500 buildings destroyed

Update: 500 buildings have been destroyed, 90 of them in the city center.

90 of power is back on in Christchurch.

Today (Sunday 5th Sept) we are expecting gale force winds, and likely rain and sleet. With many rooves damaged, chimneys down, there will be people who have wind blowing through their houses, and when the rain hits....there are going to be some serious problems for those people.

Overall, the people of Christchurch have been brilliant. Calm, supportive and coping well.

Throughout last night there were many small aftershocks. Knowing that we could be hit by an aftershock of magnitude 6, each aftershock woke me (as I am sure it did everyone else) and the heart rate increased and the adrenaline pumped. It was an unsettling night.

Cracks in paths can be minor or major, but are certainly common! There are many cracks like the one in the picture to the right, but fortunately not in our immediate block! The dog looks as bemused as the humans.

There is going to be some massive work ahead for road workers. It would be, I imagine, a task that must surely seem insurmountable. And it must be done quickly.

For the many houses with fallen chimneys and damaged rooves, they will be needing repairs as fast as they can get them. It is fortunate that we are out of winter, but it is un-fortunate that spring is an unpredictable season where we can get all four seasons in the one day.

My daughter's boyfriend's family suffered cracks through the exterior of their house as we did, and also in the interior, but nothing structural. It helps that he is a builder!! I would imagine he is going to be one of many people with a lot of work coming in. Roofies and builders are going to be the sought after people, the most worshipped men in town!!! Tradesmen are the unsung heroes of our workforce.

Chablias anyone?

The supermarkets, as you can imagine, would have had a massive mess to clean up.

Think of the supermarket you shop in, and consider how much would fall in an earthquake, imagine the mess, the smashed jars and bottles.

The picture to the left is the wine aisle...not a pretty sight.

However, it is, I am sure, an example of what has happened to every supermarket in Christchurch. There is simply no way, in an earthquake as violet as the one we experienced at 4.35 a.m. yesterday morning, that any shop could have got away unscathed.

Bottles of wine, jars of anything you can imagine, will all have fallen and smashed. What a massive clean up staff with have faced. But what seems to have happened everywhere is, the employees turned up, regardless of whether they were scheduled to work or not, and they just got down to work.

People have done what needed to be done, to help. They have been unselfish.

And, dear readers...I just had to share this with you. Because we have been asked to conserve water, some people have set up a new toilet.

Don't you just love Kiwi ingenuity!!

Apparently the dust from your vacuum cleaner can be good at soaking up the liquid...and you can throw in some garden soil to cover up the solids....yes, I know, not really something we want to talk about!

A 4.2 magnitude aftershock hit as I was writing this entry, and gave me a hell of a fright.

It is still so hard to believe all of this has happened. I am still amazed that our house is standing after the violence of the quake.

As one person said in a facebook entry: Christchurch really does rock and roll!!