Mother Natures Fury.....
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Three months on from our second and most deadly earthquake, we thought it time to check out the cleaning up progress. Monday was a public holiday so we decided to spend the morning walking the perimetre fence of the CBD as we are still not allowed into the centre of the town, it remains an eery ghost town. We nearly didn't go for safety reasons as we were rudely interupted by a 5.5 aftershock which rattled our home and nerves at 9am. At this point, small aftershocks have become part of our daily lives but the large ones still frighten us especially when they come in the dead of night.
Before making our way to the CBD we drove to the beachside suburb of Sumner as we hadn't been that way since February when the earthquake struck. It was an amazing site to see swimming pools suspended in space above rubble where the cliffs below had collapsed. It was a very eery site seeing the school at the base, knowing the playground was full of children when the cliffs collapsed. It must have been terrifying for those school children.
The CBD hadn't changed much since our last visit at Easter. You can see in the photos above the espresso cups still where they had been left outside coffee shops, autumn leaves lie in the gutters where they have blown, the clock sitting on the precise time the earthquake hit and a row of shops with their facades collapsed. You can just see a chandalier on the second story of one of the buildings. The Hotel Grand Chancelor which is 23 storeys high precides over the surrounding buildings like a drunk guard, threatening to fall on surrounding buildings. It is a strange feeling seeing all of this destruction. On the one hand I find it quite depressing, all of those lives and heritage lost, on the other hand I feel compelled to visit. I almost felt like it was not quite real, that I was standing on a movie set but not any old movie set...this set is straight out of a horror movie.................
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