kiwi me: surviving the earthquake

On the morning of the 22nd I attended the check in for international students where they gave us a tour of the campus and gave us the opportunity to meet other intentional students studying here at Lincoln University.

After the check in I headed to the grocery store with a few other international students I had met. I was in the grocery when the earthquake hit. It was a different experience and pretty intense.. I don’t really know how to describe it. Everyone, locals, students, staff, absolutely everyone in the building froze when it happened. You could hear the quake coming and then just stood and watched as people ran from everything in the store that crashed to the ground and watched through the stores windows the parking lot of cars dance as the earth shook. As soon as the earth stopped trembling the staff went into panic mode everyone checked out and the store shut down. Walking back to the University the second tremor hit, it wasn’t hard enough where I was to knock you down but the ground shook and you could see and feel the earth move under your feet. Since then I have felt many aftershocks some of which are more intense than others.

At the time I didn’t understand the severity of the quake. To be honest I wasn’t sure if it was just a regular aftershock or something more severe. It wasn’t until we arrived on campus to see everyone evacuated, hear the President of the University speech, and then watching the news in the dinning hall while engineers check the safety of each building that I started to understand the intensity what had happened.

As most of you know from the news Christchurch is a mess, many have died and 100’s are still missing. I am so incredibly thankful that I was not in the city at the time... see the thing was that I was planning to head into down that day but decided against it and I had been in the city just the day before. Many people however are in serious need after the quake. I went into the residential area just outside of Christchurch yesterday (the 25th) to help. I spent the day alongside over a 100 other student volunteers digging trenches to channel water in the streets. Many of the streets have been covered in a gray silt (the material has characteristics very similar to concrete.. its a fine dust when dry but like a liquid muddy material when wet). This material becomes a liquid and comes through the soil and cracks during an earthquake, this is called liquidation. At the moment this silt covers peoples entire yards, roads and is even in some peoples homes. These pictures just show some of the damage along with the people I worked alongside that day.