Just realized it's his birthday. He must be having one hell of a party to set off the seismigraphs !!!

For me, the staggering thing is the patchy damage effects we're seeing. This earthquake has similar headline numbers to the Haiti earthquake ( 7.1 vs 7.0 there, both about 30 kms out from the main city centre, both about 10 to 16 k deep) - but no loss of life ( ( put that down to a 4.35 am timing - midday on a weekday would have been so very very different), lower population density, higher building standards)

Damage appears to be older brick facade style buildings where the facade has taken out verandahs, or fallen into the building. Plus LOTS of liquefaction issues - many houses will have mud and silt damage. One friend close to here tells of her husband heading out the bedroom door during the shake to attend to their daughter, but by the time she got to the door, it had closed and jammed. After the quake settled, they wrenched the door open and decided to step outside - but their front and back lawns were under silty water and mud, forced bu through the ground. A gate that used to shut flat against their house now doesn't - it has a 4 inch overlap. After a few minutes they determined they had no water services, so decided to get some buckets of water from the river, just across the road, to fill the toilet cistern. NO water in the river - took 15 minutes to return. Their house is probably a writeoff

Within a 5 block circle of here, which includes the riverisde area, many many damaged commercial premises and many homes that have moved on foundations, or settled or cracked. The local state of emergency has been extended by another 2 days, no schools, preschools etc are open and commercial businesses are been warned not to to open until building safety checks have been carried out. I expect to see and hear from many of our distressed pharmacy clients today ; some will be in unlivable homes

We live semi-rurally and have no damage in the surrounding area, but the township of Kaiapoi, a riverside town , is a mess. Our local church there has about 150 - 200 people there, and our informal partial gathering for thankfulness and support yesterday counted up 11 homes with damage, many likely to be unlivable.

So all in all, although the entire city has definitely dodged a biggy, it would be fair to say the impact, both now in terms of anxieties and long term in terms of people's livelihoods or home rebuilding challenges, are and will be significant

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.

although a smaller EQ than Sept ( 6.3 vs 7.0 ) BUT the epicenter is very shallow, much ,much closer to the city centre ( only 6 miles or so) and arrives in the city amplified by the volcanic rock that it originated in ( different earth substructure than Sept)

See the NZHerald.co.nz and stuff.co.nz websites

The devastation is huge. I was driving with my wife and thought the rear wheel was coming off the car. I drop her back to her school and head to work.. An overbridge gives me a view of the central city - I see a massive dust cloud and immediately know we have not escaped casualties this time. My 10 minute journey takes 40 or 50 minutes - streets are damaged, river bridges down and the roads full of cars. Aftershocks rock the car as I sit in traffic.

The eastern side of town, where we are , is smashed. Our building is fine , my staff fine but shaken.

The days that follow are a blur.

EQ was 10 to 1 Tuesday - 5.30pm Wed we get power back so can offer emergency service and meds to people ( I did this on Wed, without power - handwritten pharmacy labels will be a historic quirk )

Phones are OK Wed till midday but stop working until midday Thursday. Our roads are jammed - the bridge at the end of our street is one of few standing. Our local doctors are doing their rounds on pushbike.

We have no potable water ( OK, I live rurally so bring bottles of fresh water in) , no sewerage ( portaloo arrives tomorrow, hopefully) and internet just came up late yesterday - hence our lack of response.

I have been assisting our pharmacy wholesaler re-locate - this is a vast undertaking, made necessary by building damage and the fact that the building is inside the CBD cordon. I've gotten persuasively good at talking my way past the police/Army cordon

I've not seen the US based USAR ( Urban Search and Rescue ) teams on the ground here, but they are here and we are grateful.