Earthquake Number 2

Hi everyone I hope you can all bare with me while I sort my life out. As you know My current city of Christchurch, NZ was hit by a magnitude 6.3 earthquake on Tuesday 22nd February. So Far 160 of my fellow cantabrians are dead and that is expected to rise, It was the middle of a working day and many buildings just crumpled. I myself was very lucky to escape and I am slowly getting my life back on track amongst various aftershocks of course, if you remember we have already lived through another earthquake - a magnitude of 7.1 in September last year, more powerful but it was at 4.35am so most people were at home and there were no deaths in that quake but this one was alot shallower and of course in the middle of a week day. Fortunately I know no-one who has died, however i have friends who do :(

Our home has been deemed uninhabitable and we have been staying at a relatives, fortunately we were offered a house yesterday which we had to take as there are hundreds of others looking for new houses also. It is quite grossly out of our budget but we have to do what we have to do to have a home!Enough depressing stuff here are some pictures of what I came home to last Tuesday:

Our Lounge, TV appears to go, glass top of table gone, not sure if home theatre goes - fingers crossed!

View other way towards kitchen, where you can see a couple of glasses up on shelf - that was full glass everywhere and food fallen out of cupboards all over floor

My new shoe rack fell over and shoes were everywhere :(

My bfs car (left) was on stands and luckily fell to the left otherwise it would have fallen on my car! Check out the massive angle its on it was straight! My car sustained a couple of scratches due to items falling on her but nthing major thank god!

This is a view out our driveway after we have cleaned up this was all covered in grey water and sand (i.e. liquafaction) completely - I had to literally wade through it to get to my house. You can see the piles of it on the street - this is what the streets look like, piles of liquifaction everywhere, holes & all bent and buuckled

A crack on the outside of our bedroom

A crack by the front door which you can actually see right through, there are also various cracks all over the walls in the inside, the house has sunk, door wont close, floor inside house sunk in parts and carpet buggered. We refused to stay there as we felt it was unsafe and as of yesterday an engineer has indeed demmed our house unsafe to live in. This is such a terrible tragedy and the lives of myself and fellow family, friends and cantabrians have been upturned for many months to come, our whole CBD is mostly destroyed and no-one is able to enter it. That means no nightlife as all the clubs were in the CBD, alot of shopping and my work.

Ok thats enough for today I think, Hopefully I will be back up and running with my blog in the not to distant future, please hang in there! If you are in Christchurch take care and holla if you need anything. Please see my previous post for donation information or email me if you would like to know how to donate. xxx