Plenty of rumbles after our garlic bread and french onion soup Spookey, but no mate, nothing more substantial than that thankfully. It's incredible, they're right on a faultline and tonight they were saying that the Kiwis experience 4 or 5 thousand rumbles a year. We had a small quake in Tassie late last year where things in the house started rattling in the middle of the night. A weird sound; a low growl, like the sound of a storm, but underground.
It's more in the region of 15,000 but we only feel a few hundred of them. There's a reason we're called the shakey isles
Here's a readings from a seismic drum near the affected area:
http://www.geonet.org.nz/earthquake/drums/mqz-drum.html
And here's a page with some telling pictures:
http://www.geonet.org.nz/earthquake/
Weirdly, the Wellington region where I live is where we were all expecting a massive quake, and one even bigger than this one at that.
It was really quite reaffirming of our nation's character when you see on the news, overweight bankers and financial consultants who were returning from lunch, putting down their briefcases and helping to pull the injured out. Seeing people show up with station wagons and 4 wheel drives when the city ran out of Ambulances, in order to get the seriously wounded to hospitals. Civilians, their suits covered in dust and mud and sewerage and blood, shoulder to shoulder with rescue personnel helping out however they can. Students using social networking to organise armies of the willing and able to help. A large multinational foodstuffs company with their own private spring announced that they would freely give water from it to whoever showed up.
And further to that the ANZAC spirit shone - there were some Aussie doctors at a conference who arrived in the city centre, collected as many medical supplies as they could and went to work helping where they could. Australia immediately dispatched specialist search and rescue teams also to help out.
It's also heartbreaking to know that I'm stuck half a country away and unable to help beyond giving blood and a bit of money. I have friends who live there who have secured their families and pets and they're heading in to start digging, and my younger brother has been called up to fly down there to help get communications back up.
There's plenty of information available here:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-earthquake?label=Christchurch+quake