Rolleston/Burnham, South Island, NZ It's been a busy few weeks! Was away on geology fieldtrips all the previous two weeks, then on Saturday morning 4th September 2010 at 4.35 am we got woken in Westport to a reasonable but very long earthquake. My husband was back in Christchurch at the time and texted me saying "are you ok?". I replied, "yes!"...
The magnitude 7.1 Christchurch earthquake broke off an enormous chunk of Castle Rock in the Port Hills which has tumbled down towards the Lyttelton tunnel. View from Morgan's Valley (-43.578037° 172.714828°).
The earthquake knocked over the bird bath.
Debra points at the beginnings of a sand volcano not long after the big earthquake.
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(I righted the bird bath after the initial earthquake. None of the after-shocks were sufficient to knock it over again.)
One of the many sand volcanos erupting from the ground after the Christchurch earthquake.
And, yes, the newspaper always gets through! The Press newspapers were delivered in our area of Hoon Hay in the hours after the earthquake.
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This one was really flowing out of the ground.
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These were scattered across the park.
Robbie watches a sand volcano smother his driveway.
It would have been a glorious Spring day in Christchurch had it not been for the magnitude 7.1 earthquake at 4:30 am. All the water and silt you can see covering the street in this photo erupted from the ground following the earthquake.
Sand volcanoes put the silt all over the road.
An usual thing to see coming from the ground in Hoon Hay, Christchurch.
This has made a huge mess for the residents to clean up. I heard on the news that homes have been damaged by subsidence in areas of earthquake-caused liquefaction like this.