Ōtautahi / Christchurch Daily Photo

I’ve been away for a few days down south – hence the lack of posts. Today I needed to go into town and stopped for a quick photo of Manchester Street. I guess these buildings won’t be here much longer. I was shocked when I stopped at Colombo street – a very large amount of empty space there now. We had two decent after shocks today – a 4.0 and a 4.7 – the first near Lyttelton and the second near Rolleston. Being in Mt Pleasant I felt the Lyttelton one very differently from the Rolleston quake. The ones close by are like ‘boom!’ – smack! everything vibrates – and the quakes further away in the West of the city are more rolling.

It’s hard to believe we’ve been living with quakes for nearly a year, as the one year anniversary of the first big quake is this weekend. I can barely remember how I felt the weeks after the first quake as I think we all thought life was just going to get back to normal fairly quickly (which in many ways it did). But after February and June life has been anything but normal for so many people. So when I now hear of a city somewhere experiencing a big quake, I now know that the after effects linger for a very long time. Yes, my knowledge of earthquakes has certainly been sharpened thanks to direct experience.