It's hard to believe that more than a week has passed since the city of Christchurch was violently awoken by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake. While life has returned to normal for us, many face the arduous task of putting back together shattered homes, businesses and lives.
It all began at 4.35am on Saturday 4th September. Oddly I'd been having trouble sleeping that night, having woken up at 2.30am and started listening to my iPhone. I woke up again at about 4.15am and turned it back on, but was somewhere between sleep and waking when it happened.
The bed shook violently, the windows rattled and the rumble from the ground is something I'll never forget. Jess awoke and exclaimed, "It's an earthquake," to which I apparently had the good sense to reply, "I know". I rolled off the bed and as I fell to the floor I distinctly recall seeing the whole sky light up twice as transformers blew. Once I hit the floor and the shaking continued, I rolled back under the bed and waited for the shaking to stop.
Once we had collected our senses, Jess and I realized the power was out and that we could be in the middle of a major event. Some of the effects of the massive adrenaline rush from a fight or flight situation are the need to visit the bathroom, and sudden thirst. Both of these soon alerted us to the fact the water was also out.
Strangely one of the services that didn't go out was the mobile network. Both Jess and I grabbed our iPhones and got online to figure out exactly what had happened. Twitter became an invaluable source on information in those first few hours, with hundreds of Christchurch tweeters exchanging information on what had happened well ahead of mainstream media.
Jess also had a battery radio beside the bed which we hooked up to some speakers to listen for information, but were unable to get much as Newstalk ZB went off the air until around 6am. Once they came back on the air, there was wall to wall coverage of the earthquake, but little firm information at that point.
As dawn struck, at 6.50am, we got up and dressed in warm clothes as it was a cold morning and the heating was out. I walked around the house giving it a thorough inspection for damage. Luckily for us, the repairs that were carried out last year seem to have protected out house brilliantly, with absolutely no damage visible.
At around 8am we decided to go for a walk around the neighbourhood to see what had happened. Our area looked relatively undamaged although there were a number of chimneys that had come down.
Sitting around the house listening to the radio and conversing on Twitter eventually proved too much for me and I had to do something, checking over my parents' house seemed like a good thing to do. They're both overseas at the moment but their place could have sustained some damage. Fortunately the exterior of the house had no damage at all, and inside all we found were a few broken glasses and vases.
As the day continued, there were many more small tremors, but nothing that had us diving for cover. Power and water were restored to our house around midday and we made a trip to the Addington Coffee Co-op for a dose of normality on a day that was anything but.
Once the shops opened, we headed in to the supermarket to get some supplies, along with everyone else in the neighbourhood. Some essential survival items in our baskets, we headed back home to hunker down.
Doing a quick mental stock take of the food we had in the cupboard at the time, I figured there was about a week's worth of food. Water could have been an issue for us, we had some stored but quite a lot of it contained barley and hops. Something I need to remedy in the future.
Fortunately with the power back we were able to boil a lot of water which were then stored around the house, some in the fridge, some in the jug and some in the bathrooms for teeth brushing and pill taking.
That night I doubt many Cantabrians slept well, as every aftershock brought on an adrenaline rush which would keep you wide awake.
As Sunday dawned, the full enormity of the disaster struck home for many a buildings began to be demolished around the city. For us it was a day to sit around the house.
Jess and I headed back in to work on Monday to see how our respective workplaces had fared. For Jess it was rapidly back to business as usual, but for me it was clear the next few days would be interrupted. After doing a visual inspection on all of the computers and data projectors in the school, the boss sent us home.
The decision was made that the school would not reopen until Wednesday, but I decided to pop in and sort out a number of little jobs floating around, again heading home around lunchtime, after the closure of the school was extended to the following Monday.
Wednesday was going to be a quiet day for me until just before 8am when a 5.1 magnitude aftershock hit, once again sending me scrambling under the bed for the first time since the big one. This shake also knocked out the power for 20 minutes. Unfortunately this meant all the servers at work initiated a controlled shutdown, a good thing, but it also means I needed to head back into work.
After Wednesday morning's jolt, there were plenty of aftershocks but none more than a reminder that the earth still wasn't quite stable. Of course these jolts also had most people at the end of their emotional tether with a number of heated discussions at work. As someone who has suffered from depression for over 10 years, you'd expect me to be at the end of my rope, but I was like the emotional rock for everyone to lean on at work. Jess also did remarkably well, despite the fact that she's pregnant.
Both of us resisted the temptation to go sightseeing until the following Saturday when we took a walk up and down Avonside Drive, one of the worst affected streets in town. The damage there was a real shock to me, mostly to see it with my own eyes as on TV it can be a little surreal.
Currently we're both back at work and back to normal although we are still a little on edge. Every creak in the house has us looking up and turning our heads like meerkats.
What this has really taught me is that we need to be a bit more prepared. I remember laughing at my Mum for hoarding all sorts of items when a bird flu pandemic seemed possible, now I'm not laughing at all. I have a list of items I need to buy over the coming weeks and put together a survival kit, as well as establish a maintenance plan for the kit. Then we'll be ready for anything Mother Nature can throw at us.
