New Zealand Earthquake

[citivolus (Ric)]

New Zealand had a 7.0 over night, centred just west of Stu Parker's place.

A shake map is here:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquak...tbj/index.html

I hope that all there are alright.

Eric

[DavidTrap (David)]

Hope the most trouble he has is the need to redo his polar alignement. I suspect that won't be limit of the "issues" faced by the people of NZ...

DT

[Suzy]

As soon as I woke up, hubby told me the news. I'm about to Google to try and find out more info on what has happened.

[Terry B]

See here
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/
and here
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquak...us2010atbj.php

Lots of damage in the SMH website
http://www.smh.com.au/world/powerful...904-14us4.html

[DeanoNZL (Adrian)]

Here are some more photos from the nzherald site.
Lots of power & water outages accross the city, and well into the rural areas. 17 aftershocks so far.
It is not if, but when quakes will strike.

[GTB_an_Owl (Geoff)]

that must have been SOME birthday party you threw Adrian

happy birthday by the way

geoff

[renormalised (Carl)]

Hope there wasn't too much damage or injury.

[garyp]

well hi guys. I don't know how Stu got on but we had a real good shake up here in Timaru too. It was dark and the house started shaking and the windows were rattling like they were going to break. We got the kids up and all headed to the dining room table for protection. Thankfully it didn't get any worse for us and was over in about a minute. We have no damage to the house. It was scary for us so it must have been bad for those in Christchurch. We live about 180km from CHCH.

DeanoNZL has posted some good photos to tell the story in Christchurch.

Cheers

Gary

[Kevnool (Kev)]

Glad to hear your OK Gary with no damage.
Cheers Kev.

[Blue Skies (Jacquie)]

Glad to hear everyone is ok. I have been looking at the pictures Dean linked to and I'm amazed at all the fallen brickwork and that no one was caught under it! I suppose it was good thing it happened at night when very few people would have been on the streets otherwise I could very well imagine there would have been fatalities.
Hope the aftershocks aren't too bad.

[garyp]

Thanks Kev. I have experienced a few quakes over the years but this was the worst and scariest one by far.

[PeterM]

Hi all,
I have spoken with Stu Parker this morning, he and his wife are fine despite being very close to the epi-center. Stu says it literally threw him out of bed and there maybe some damage to his pier. What is amazing is that his setup was busy taking images throughout the night even as the quake hit and here is what a mag 7 quake does to a 30 second image.

PeterM.

[ballaratdragons (Ken)]

Wow, that photo should be sent to the newspapers! Fascinating!!!!!!

[Park123 (Stu)]

Hi All,
A pretty big shake up here but we were lucky to get away with only minor damage.Nothing major.
My Sister house was badly damaged and may have to be rebuilt.
We are getting really strong winds which are causing problems as well.
The main thing is that everybody is safe.
my scope and observatory seem to escaped with out any damage.

Stu

[Benboy (Ben)]

The quake was pretty freaky and there is going to be a lot of work in the next little while - we're still having aftershocks- some quite big - have had nearly 70 so far.

But on another note - there was one advantage of being in Christchurch for the quake. All the power was off. There were no street lights and no light pollution! The sky was just like being out in the middle of nowhere - heaps of stars! - gotta get something positive out of it right?!!