I live in suburban Christchurch.
It was a nasty wee jolt, felt like someone repeatedly picked up the house and slammed it back into the ground about half-a-dozen times. No time to react, I woke up and grabbed the nearest large object (my wife) and hung on for dear life until the shaking stopped.
Rode across town on my motorbike soon after first light to check on parents, siblings. What struck me immediately was that the older double-brick houses had copped plenty of visible damage, but most modern buildings seemed to have escaped with little or none. Many brick chimneys were piles of brick beside their houses, or worse had gone through the roof. Many churches are badly damaged.
My own house seems completely intact, the only damage being a PC that fell off the workstation and now no longer boots up. At the other end of the spectrum, three of the people that I work with no longer have houses, just piles of rubble.
The very weird thing to me is that if you had asked anyone in Canterbury ahead of this quake where they thought the next quake would come from, most would have pointed to the alpine fault that bisects NZ. But I'd say no-one, geologists included, would ever have picked the middle of the Canterbury plains as anything at all to worry about. It just goes to show how little we know about the ground under our feet.
