Aftershock

4:36am, Saturday 4 September 2010.
That is when things started to change.

After only being asleep for around an hour, I was annoyed to open my eyes and see the red numbers of my bedside clock reading 4:35am. Not even 30 seconds later, an almost deafening rumble had me raising my head trying to figure out just what the hell was going on. It almost sounded like there was a gale blowing against the window above my head, crossed with a plane flying over and a coal train making it's way down the railway tracks less than a kilometre away.

Then the waves hit, bed shaking back and forth. 'I should probably get under the doorway,' flashed through my mind, quickly dismissed with the memory of past earthquakes being over in a few seconds. But the movement wasn't ceasing.

Crashing. In the dim light that my clock was throwing out, I could see things being shaken off my desk. Something bigger went elsewhere in the house. 'Ok, maybe I should just roll under the bed. Nah, I can't be bothered moving.' Yes, I realise how stupid that sounds, but really, I'd been awake for less than a minute by then and some tasks are just too much for that level of alertness. Frankly, I'm surprised I even remembered the proper protocol for earthquake survival at that stage of sleepiness.

The shaking lasted for what seemed like minutes before dying out. At some stage I must have grabbed my cell phone, seeing as it was clutched in my hand. Flipping it open, I started a tweet, before the house was jumping again, this time the power going out with the first jolt. 'Ok, I really should get under the bed now,' but still no movement. Another twenty or so seconds of violence and then there was nothing but pure silence.

Holy fuck i think we're havin a massive earthquake

Hitting send, sound slowly started filtering through. Shining the backlight around my bedroom, the destruction I saw was more than it sounded like. Overall, there wasn't much that looked damaged, but my desk was almost completely empty of the junk that usually piled up on it, my bookshelf had fallen over at some stage and partially blocked my route to the door.

My dad was stumbling his way through the darkness and debris, calling out to check if we were all ok. I called out a, "Yes," as he opened my door, finally getting up off the mattress to follow him down the hallway.

Turning into the dining room area, there was even more mess. Dad had found the torch we kept on a shelf in the kitchen that opened into the dining area and was slowly shining it around the room. Our wall unit at the side of the table was virtually empty, only a few pieces of paper stayed on the shelves inside the cupboard. There was glass, porcelain, and rugby trophies broken across the carpet that needed to be carefully manoeuvred past.

My sister emerged from her room, the first night she'd chosen to sleep in her bed rather than on the couch in the lounge during the week she'd been staying with us while she had a cold. "If we got it this bad, I hate to think what it's like on the Coast," she murmured.

It was probably the most obvious thought that hadn't even occurred to me yet. New Zealand was known as "The Shaky Isles" for being on the edge of the Pacific and Australian tectonic plates, and averaged around 14 earthquakes a day. Most of these were of low magnitude or centred so deep that they were barely felt, if at all. Also, they generally happened along the Alpine Fault, which ran down the middle of the Southern Alps close to the West Coast of the South Island. The other main place for earthquakes was our country's capital, Wellington, which was on the upper end of the Alpine Fault, in the lower North Island.

"Oh wow, yea. If there's even a Coast left. Or Wellington." The West Coast was a small mining, forestry and fishing community mostly. There were no high-rise buildings, more common were wooden shacks.

It only took a few minutes for us to get organised with candles lit for light. Dad had found our old camping lamps too, so we could get a real sense of just how much damage there was. Thankfully there didn't seem to be any structural damage, which was a bit of a surprise considering how shoddy our builder had been.

The lounge was even more of a mess than the dining room, again the wall unit was practically empty of the many knickknacks and photo frames it usually held. Our 47" TV, which we'd only had back from getting a new screen for a week, was impaling my sister's laptop as it tipped onto the floor. We started cleaning up a little, getting the broken glass out of high traffic areas.

Sending text messages out to our family and friends around the rest of the country to let them know we were all alright was interesting. My dad's sister in Motueka, about a five hour drive north, was woken by the jolt, yet my Grandad in the next room slept through it.

Hearing the phone ring was a shock. The power was still out and we hadn't even thought of checking the phone lines. Rushing down to the back of the house where our only analogue phone was revealed another aunt, mum's sister, on the other end of the line, checking up on us. She lived twenty minutes away and was as startled as we were. She was listening to a transistor radio, but there wasn't much information coming out yet.

That was when we started getting news of just what had happened, via the wonderful world of Twitter. My friend, Andrea, in Maryland announced that CNN was reporting a 7.4 magnitude earthquake centred just southwest of Christchurch. Also known as pretty much right under our house.

"Oh, there goes another one." My mother's new catchphrase, said every. Single. Time. we got another aftershock, which at the moment was every few minutes.

While she was still on the phone her cell started to ring, so I, being the closest, went to answer it. Our friends a few blocks away were checking up on how we were. They lost their entire Waterford crystal collection and the contents of their liquor cabinet were now soaked into their carpet. Oh, and their two cats took off in the shaking, but otherwise they were all ok too.

Half a bottle of red wine had broken onto our kitchen tiles, covering the floor in liquid. Knowing that water would probably be in short supply dad went down to the water race at the end of our street to fill up a bucket so we could mop up.

Seeing headlights going down our street, hearing the accompanying thump of newspapers landing on concrete, we headed out to the driveway to see if the delivery guy had heard anything. He had no news either, radio was out and he was a little annoyed with being asked for information by that stage. It had probably been about twenty minutes since the quake by then. When the tremor hit, he said it felt as if he'd struck a patch of oil on the road, sliding all over the asphalt. Then the powerlines arced and the streetlights went out. It was only when the first people out on the street stopped him that he found out what it really was.

That started the first of our neighbourly chats. The Scottish woman next door that we'd barely said hello to in passing came out to see what was going on. They'd never felt an earthquake before and were wondering if their initial reaction of huddling together under the kitchen table was the right thing to do. Assuring her that it was, and handing over some candles so they'd have some light, we went back to cleanup mode.

Apparently sewerage lines were broken, so water would soon be compromised. It was fortunate we had two big 20-litre water containers from rugby to fill before it went bad.

As the sun began to rise we thought about taking photos of the damage for insurance purposes. We could also do a proper inspection of the house, only finding a couple of bricks had popped out a centimetre. There didn't seem to be any cracking of the foundations, luckily.

x

After cleaning up a majority of the mess in the main areas of the house, along with another couple of neighbourhood driveway talks, we decided to walk around to Sandy and Pete's place to see how they were doing. There were few people out in our small town, a little crowd was checking out the damage to our supermarket with a couple of security guards patrolling the doors. No looting here!

Sandy and Pete were fine, taking a break after their own cleaning stint. It was nice to just sit down with a drink and pretend things were almost normal for about an hour, only interrupted when Sandy would run out from under the veranda, onto the lawn during each aftershock. She was always a source of entertainment, and it was somewhat comforting that she still maintained that during a disaster.