[time-nuts] Fw: your 'quake

[Alan Melia]

Hi All I though you might like to hear our member Steve Rooke is a survivor
in Christchurch. This just received from him.
Alan G3NYK

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Rooke" <sar10538 at gmail.com>
To: "Alan Melia" <alan.melia at btinternet.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2011 6:55 AM
Subject: Re: your 'quake


> Hi Alan,
>
> How's things with you? Well, it's pretty grim here, old man. My Mum
> and myself are OK and our houses are in pretty good shape but we both
> had extensive damage to the internal items. I have now come to stay
> with Mum temporarily and we have cleaned up the mess here so it is
> habitable. The inside of my house is completely trashed and I'll go
> back there to tackle it once things are stable enough to leave Mum on
> here own. Up until now we have not had water, sewerage, power and
> telephone services but the phone services have just been connected so
> I'm sending this via dial-up from my laptop running, for the moment,
> on battery power. The have no idea when the other services will be
> fixed and it could take weeks or even months. The roads around the
> place are totally wrecked with large cracks, bumps and sink holes with
> many of those which have swallowed large parts of cars and trucks
> which have driven into them. In addition there is a thick covering of
> liquefaction silt on the roads. Driving around here is very hazardous
> and really to be avoided unless completely necessary. The Central
> Business District has been very badly hit with every second building
> destroyed. It happened at 12:51pm on tuesday so many people were in
> those buildings working and there have been dozens of deaths. So far
> the official figure is 75 but that is ONLY the account of those bodies
> that have been identified, there are many more that have been
> recovered, many still lie dead on the streets and literally hundreds
> buried in completely collapsed buildings that had caught on fire and
> are really expected to be dead. A state of National Emergency has been
> called and this is the first time that has happened in the history of
> New Zealand as this is the worst disaster in our time. All we can do
> is listen to the radio running on batteries and cope with torches
> until those batteries run out. The news coming continuously over the
> radio...
>
> This just over the radio, the power company have just said that their
> infrastructure in this area of town is so badly damaged in the ground
> that they are likely to abandon it and put in a new overhead feed in
> it's place so that means it could take some considerable time.
>
> You see it is the suburbs to the east of the city, were we are, that
> have been the most hit. The quake was just 6.3 but was centred much
> closer to the city and much shallower too so that is why it has caused
> an order of magnitude worse damage than the 7.1 one back in September.
> I managed to get some water today by walking to a school nearby which
> has a well-head that is overflowing. I had to walk through the water
> around it and collect the overflowing water into plastic bottles. I
> hope it continues to flow as water here is not easy to get. I tried to
> get food and petrol today but the petrol stations nearby were closed
> and so were the shops...
>
> My battery said I had 3h left but it just cut out on me but I'm up on
> a generator that we bought today over the other side of the town. Had
> to queue for ages to get petrol for the car and the generator. Have
> the TV going now and can see some of the carnage finally. We only have
> 1.2kVA so not enough to drive everything bar the simplest things. I
> brought up the ADSL router but there is no connection so I guess NZ
> Telecom is not running at full capacity yet, so I'm still doing this
> on dial-up.
>
> Leave it at that for now.
>
> Kind regards,
> Steve
> PS. forward this around.
>
> On 24/02/2011, Alan Melia <alan.melia at btinternet.com> wrote:
> > Hi Steve hope you and friends/ family are OK....we are all thinking of
you,
> > and the devastation to that beautiful city.
> >
> > Alan
> > G3NYK
> >
> >
>
>
> -- 
> Steve Rooke - ZL3TUV & G8KVD
> The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.
> - Einstein