The 7.8 Earthquake in Kaikoura, New Zealand

It was raining when we left Picton and had been for most of the previous day when we had arrived on the Interislander ferry from Wellington. We were driving south and by the time we reached the small town of Seddon the rain had eased. We turned off Highway 1 onto Wakefield Street heading to Yealand Estate for an early Sunday morning vineyard tour and wine tasting. I was leading a group of 15 English tourists and today was the 12th day of a 25 day New Zealand tour. Over the previous days we had been to the Bay of Islands, as far north as Cape Reinga and driven down through Rotorua to Wellington before crossing Cook Strait. The weather had, in the main, been pretty good and everything had gone according to plan. At Yealand’s we were escorted around the vineyard by winery guide Nanette who talked to us about the diminutive babydoll sheep being bred to keep the grass down, had shown us the extensive expanse of neatly rowed vines, the solar-powered speakers that played classical music to the growing grapes and the chickens ‘employed’ to keep insects at bay. After tasting samples of Yealand’s excellent export-quality wine we were on our way to Kaikoura for lunch.

'Music in the Vines', sign on Yealand's Winery, Seddon

    After passing the salt pans of Lake Grassmere where most of New Zealand’s salt, both commercial and domestic, is produced we drove through the rolling grassy hills which lead to the spectacular coastal highway to Kaikoura. The South Pacific washes, at times violently, upon this rugged rocky shore and it is somewhat sobering to think that the next land out there is the coast of Chile, over 9000 kms away. Today the sea was relatively calm and the weather had improved considerably as we passed the interesting little stone church of St Oswald at Wharenui. As we drove towards the Kaikoura Mountains I gave my clients a basic insight into the tectonic forces of nature that are at work here – both on land and off-shore. The Kaikoura Mountains have been created by a series of active faults that join up with the rifts in the Awatere and the Wairau Valleys to form the Alpine fault that runs 600 kilometres down the western side of the Southern Alps. Not too far off-shore is the deep Kaikoura Marine Canyon where sperm whales hunt giant squid and seals and dolphins feed on other sea creatures that exist on the up-welling of nutrients from the cool waters of the canyon. I told them that these tectonic forces moved frequently on a geological time-frame, but only very slowly on a human scale – we would, of course, be safe but I could not guarantee it!

The rugged interior of the Seaward Kaikoura Mountains - pre-earthquake

    We crossed the Clarence River, which follows a fault between the two ranges of the Kaikoura mountains, then proceeded down the more rugged coast to Ohau Point, where there is a seal colony close to the road which was always a good place to introduce my groups to the kekeno, the NZ fur seal - Arctocephalus forsteri. Closer to Kaikoura we passed the famous Nin’s Bin which for about 40 years has been one of the cheapest places to purchase crayfish, the NZ rock lobster, which breed abundantly on this coast. It had been a couple of years since I had last visited Kaikoura but the town looked pretty much the same, although there was a new council building with a rather distinctive ‘craypot’ feature still under construction. The ‘Why Not’ café was as busy as ever as was the ‘Cray Pot’ next door.

The new local council offices & the Fish Tank Lodge, 10 hours before the Earthquake, Kaikoura

    We left Kaikoura around 2pm and drove out past the airfield. George, our driver, and I had decided to continue along the coast highway rather than take the Inland Kaikoura route and after a few kilometres drove through the first of the two road tunnels that can be tricky for a large vehicle to manoeuvre though. George muttered under his breath and made a comment that some fool in a car had made a partial attempt to overtake the coach as he was lining up the first tunnel. He said this was quite a common occurrence. There were plenty of seals on the beaches and rocks just off the road but no sign of the dusky dolphins which is one of the attractions of Kaikoura. In the distance I could see one of Denis Buurman’s Dolphin Encounter boats but we were too far away to make out any splashes caused by frisky antics of the duskies. In the past I had often seen them fairly close inshore. We drove along Goose Bay and through Oaro before climbing up into the Hundalees, a winding section of road that took us away from the coast. George and I both had memories of the old road the wound even more through these hills until re-alignment took place in the early 2000s. At Parnassus we turned onto the narrow Leader Road which follows the river of the same name through very attractive hill country and past the large hill station of Woodchester which even has its own small church. We stopped for a photo on Waiau Hill which overlooks the town and the braided river of the same name before making a stop at Brenda’s on Lyndon. All my group had large ice-creams, being amazed at just how much there was in a ‘single’ scoop for just $2.50. Next door is the Waiau Lodge Hotel where I had stopped for lunch on earlier tours. I had a quick look at the hotel while I was eating my ice-cream, it was pretty much as it had always been and I took a photo of the door to O’Malleys Garden (the hotel garden) where: ‘All ye who enter must wear a smile.’

Ice-creams at Brenda's on Lyndon, Waiau - 8 hours before the 7.8 Kaikoura Earthquake

        We crossed the long one-lane bridge over the Waiau River as we left town and after passing through Rotherham turned onto the road to Hanmer Springs. Hanmer Springs is just off the Lewis Pass Highway and the road crosses a narrow one-lane bridge high above the Waiau River Gorge. There is a sharp turn through a couple of cuttings in the crumbling schist rock before the road flattens out for the final few kilometres to the town. It was about 5.30pm when we pulled up at the Heritage Hotel in Hanmer Springs where we were staying for two nights. After an excellent dinner in the hotel we all settled in for the night. 

    I had probably been asleep about an hour when suddenly I was jolted awake. It was pitch dark and everything was shaking violently. I immediately knew it was an earthquake, and a very powerful one at that. The shaking and noise went on – and on! Lots of thoughts went through my mind – in an earthquake seek shelter – in doorways, there was just a bathroom which was not of a particularly strong wood, but then there was no way I would be able to stand up. Crawl under something – there was no table and the bed was only a couple of inches off the ground, so that was out. Well, I thought, as nothing was falling on me, it was best if I just stayed where I was in the bed. Eventually – it seemed like an eternity but it was in fact just two long minutes - the shaking finally ceased. I jumped up – there was no electricity but my cell-phone which was on charge provided sufficient light. The time, I noted was 00.04 on Monday 14 November. I pulled on some trousers, pulled on my jacket and raced down stairs. The hotel‘s emergency generator had kicked in pretty promptly and the stairs were well lit. I had no shoes on, but fortunately there was no glass. It suddenly crossed my mind that here was history repeating itself. In 1981 I had been involved in a coach accident in Poland when  a jerrycan of petrol in the boot of the vehicle we had collided with caught fire under our vehicle. We had had to evacuate quickly then, and again I had had no shoes on. My flip-flops were somewhere under the coach-seat. As I came out of the hotel I saw several of my passengers already outside. A hotel staff member saw me and suggested I race back and put on some shoes and something warmer. There was no evidence of structural damage to the hotel and there was nothing in imminent danger of collapse so I took his advice. Once back outside I rounded up my group. Half were already there and slowly one by one the rest appeared out of the darkness. Everyone was out of the hotel with no injuries and surprisingly in good humour – maybe it was the good old British stiff-upper-lip in the face of adversity! George went to the coach and brought it round to the front of the hotel, where, besides my group, other hotel guests climbed aboard and the running of the engine kept us all warm while the hotel staff, the local Civil Defence and the fire-service checked everything. It was then that we heard that initially it had been a magnitude 6.6 earthquake only some 15 kms from Hanmer Springs and at about the same depth. It was, of course, not then known how much damage had been caused or how widespread the quake had been, but everyone agreed that it had certainly gone on for a long time. The local fire chief appeared and told us that all seemed to be OK in the town but that we could not go back into the hotel until after daylight when any non-obvious structural damage would be seen. He also told us that the road out of town was blocked by slipping before the bridge, so everyone had no choice but to stay put – there is only one road into, and out of, Hanmer Springs. 

     After an hour or so, the hotel staff came up with keys for the hotel villas, privately owned but administered by the hotel. The long Canterbury Anniversary weekend – Friday, Saturday & Sunday – had just ended and many owners had gone back to Christchurch, so thankfully we were all able to move into these 3-bedroomed houses. We were told to try and get some sleep, which was easier said than done as aftershocks of varying intensity were occurring every few minutes. I managed to doze off for short periods, and I could hear George snoring in one of the other rooms. I got up at daybreak and walked through Hanmer Springs at just after 6. I was amazed that there was remarkably little damage – the quake had now been up-graded to magnitude 7.5 which meant it was even larger. The 4-Square supermarket had all goods shaken off shelves and I could see other businesses had items lying over floors but there was no apparent damage to structures, however the town was without power. The roads in town were all ok and as I walked back to the hotel I wondered if it had just been a dream. Just after 7am the hotel staff allowed us to collect our gear from our rooms and we were told we would be staying in the villas until our departure the next morning. At 8.30 the staff had cleared up the kitchen – there had been a lot of broken crockery – and provided a very good cooked breakfast.

The Heritage Hotel in Hanmer Springs, the day after the Earthquake - undamaged

    Power was restored to Hanmer by about 11am which was sooner than we had expected. Aftershocks were still continuing with the strongest, a magnitude 6.3, occurred as a few of my group were having a light snack on the deck of one of the villas. By now we were becoming a bit blasé about the aftershocks. We knew this was quite a big one but no one batted an eyelid. One of ladies was skyping from her ipad to a relation overseas when it struck. He asked what the noise was, to which he received the reply: “Oh, just another earthquake!” Late on the afternoon of the earthquake, the road and bridge out of town was re-opened for a couple of hours but was closed through the hours of darkness. By the time we left Hanmer Springs at 6.45 on the second morning the road was open and we were fortunately able to keep to our planned itinerary and catch the TranzAlpine train at Springfield for our journey into the Southern Alps to Arthur’s Pass. By this time we had heard just how widespread and devastating this earthquake – or earthquakes – had been. Kaikoura had been completely hammered. The spectacular coast road had been badly damaged with numerous massive slips, the tunnels were completely blocked and the seal colony at Ohau Point had been destroyed, although fortunately the New Zealand fur seals are night feeders and most would have been at sea and it was just before the calving season.  It has been estimated that the seabed had risen about a metre with paua (New Zealand abalone), crayfish and beds of kelp now exposed. Around 11,000 tourists were isolated in the town itself to which there was now no road access. The effects of the earthquake, up-graded first to 7.5 then to 7.8 was felt as far away as Picton and Wellington, both of which suffered considerable damage. The small town of Waiau, which was closest to the epicentre, suffered badly and the Waiau Lodge Hotel was all but destroyed. The approaches to the bridge had dropped around 40 centimetres, but the bridge structure survived intact. Geologists all agreed that this had been a major seismic event with at least seven active faults making their presence known. There were massive ruptures in the roading infrastructure and fissures of varying lengths and depths zigzagged across farmland. There had been over 80,000 rock falls, some huge. As the reports, along with pictures, came in, we realised just how lucky we were. Hanmer Springs was not much further from the epicentre than Waiau yet there was remarkably little damage. As I walked around town I noticed one section of carparking on the main street had been cordoned off with just three stones from a decorative building support lying within. Rather ironic I thought when compared to the damage in Kaikoura, Waiau, Seddon, Picton and Wellington but I was not complaining, Hanmer Springs had been on the right side of the fault lines, the force of which went in the opposite direction, away from the town.

© Neil Rawlins  text & photography

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