Today's awful earthquake appears to make the dramatic earthquake of last September look like a mild tremor. It's only been four hours since the quake struck here as I write this, but already the scenes are horrific -- entire buildings down, unknown fatalities. We basically got off lucky in September, with not a single death. But that quake was at 4am, and this one struck in the middle of the lunch hour, and was far shallower. Grim times, and terrible to see Christchurch suffer so much. One of our sister newspapers down there had their roof fall in on them. We visited Cathedral Square, shown here today, back in 2009 -- and to see that massive icon cathedral tumbling like a set of children's blocks is humbling and frightening in equal measure.
It'll be some time before we know just how bad this was today. All my thoughts, and all New Zealand's thoughts, go to the people of Southland today.
yes, my thoughts are w your fellow Kiwis as well
ReplyDeleteThat’s going to go on for about 2 days, most likely. And don’t be surprised if there are some 5.x size aftershocks in there. Anyone doing S&R needs to be VERY aware.And everyone else should recheck their gas and water lines after the aftershocks. Sometimes the main one just softens things up for the smaller aftershocks to do the real damage.
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