New Zealand Earthquake

As you may have heard the South Island of New Zealand was hit with a 7 + magnitude earthquake on early Saturday morning. Christchurch was subject to much damage as can be seen on the news.

I got an email from our friend Hudson Biggs who lives about 250 miles south of the epicneter and all is ok with him although it was a jolt to start the day @ 4:30 am. His parents live in Christchurch and they came through with some breakage of stuff but generally ok.

Having ridden through some big earthquakes in CA I know that it is quite unsettling for many days after the quake as the aftershocks hit your nerves. Anyway all the best to our NZ friends and here is hoping that you all came through the quake safe and sound.

I just read about this online. We hope all our members and their loved ones are accounted for and well. If anyone from New Zealand has delivery issues due to the earthquake please contact our office.

Hello Tom,
Thanks for the post. Christchurch is the biggest city in the South Island with a pop of about 400,000. No deaths have been reported from the quake, and only two people in hospital in intensive care - one guy who went outside and had his chimney fall on him. The quake was relative shallow at 10 kms deep and this caused the problems. (v 8kms for Haiti which was about the same magnitude) . I guess we have less people here to get injured and the muncipal building codes came thru. The buildings most affected are those from the earliy 1900's -brick without reinforcing. Electricity and water is back on in Christchurch to most areas.

There are about 15 odd ACMOC members living within a 40 mile radius of the eppicentre which was a rural service town called Darfield. The BB regulars will know Alan Lewis who lives on the southern outskirts of Christchurch about 20 miles from Darfield.

All in all i think we can be thankful that so little injury occurred, with the quake occuring at 4.35am local time.

Hudson

Hi, Folks.
Here in DowNunder, we like to occasionally give NZ's chain a bit of a tug to see if anybody is still over there or if they are all over here now. It appears that there are at least SOME NZ'ers still living over there.

Seriously, it's great that nobody was killed and that the authorities have moved so quickly to get power restored to much of the affected area. From the news footage that I have seen, it looks as if quite a lot of buildings were moderately to severely damaged. I hope all our fellow members in that part of the world came through safely and at least relatively unaffected.

I was in Newcastle for the 1989 earthquake there and it was not a lot of fun. Twelve people died in that one and I was part of one of the body extraction and clean-up crews. You see some grief and you see some really great people.

You also see some funny things - - - like the Newcastle taxi driver who had been reported missing by his wife and it was reported on the news. He phoned the police on the third day to say that he was not missing and that he was at home with his wife. Turned out he had TWO wives and TWO homes. I suspect that some 'dynamic lifter' might have been rather widely scattered by some rapidly rotating blades after that.