A year to the day

This day last year I (along with everybody else in Canterbury) was blissfully unaware of how life was about to change for all of us. My husband was overseas and I had just returned from a very enjoyable few days visiting family in Wellington. I went to bed happy and relaxed after a busy Friday spent house cleaning and buying groceries in preparation for my other half's return on Sunday.

I'll never forget the shock of being woken in the middle of the night thinking that the house was going to fall down around me. First I heard a roar like a train somehow passing through our garden, and then I was being thrown from side to side. Not knowing the first thing about best practice during an earthquake or that I was supposed to "drop, cover, and hold," I stood frozen with fear in the corner between my bed and the window. The whole house was full of the noise of crashing (which turned out to be roof tiles clattering as well as bits of furniture falling down inside) but that was almost drowned out by the roar coming from the earth itself. It only lasted for a matter of seconds but they felt like very long seconds to me.

When the shaking stopped, I gingerly stepped out of the bedroom to see was the rest of the house still standing. Flicking on the light in the living room, I was greeted by fallen bookcases and DVDs thrown everywhere on the floor, but the house itself looked fine. I went straight to the telephone to call my brother in Wellington. Christchurch had no history of earthquakes like this so my immediate assumption was that we had caught the tail end of what must have been a devastating earthquake along the Alpine Fault. Imagine my surprise when my brother's sleepy voice answered the phone, and he hadn't felt a thing!

We still had electricity and internet access so I went straight on to Facebook to tell my friends what had happened and compare notes with other people. While I was doing this we were having frequent powerful aftershocks, but I had no idea if this was normal or not. I didn't even know if what I felt was a large earthquake or just something small - I had nothing else to compare it to. This confusion only increased when I put on my dressing gown and slippers and took a walk down to the street. Houses were dark and quiet, and there was no sign of any activity. Perhaps I was overreacting and should just go home and go back to sleep like everybody else apparently had.

It took several hours before I felt calm enough to sleep, and during this time the aftershocks kept coming. I felt so powerless in the face of Mother Nature; there was nowhere that I could go to get away from the shaking. And yet I still had no idea that we had just survived a 7.1 magnitude earthquake.

The following few days revealed the extent of the damage to the oldest and most vulnerable buildings in the city centre and out towards Darfield at the epicentre of the quake, and to the land in the riverside suburbs in Christchurch and in Kaiapoi. People had lost their homes and businesses, and we were all scared and traumatised - but we were all still alive. We had survived. The miracle had happened and a terrible quake hit at a time when few people were out and about and those who were awake managed to escape with their lives, even if some people were badly hurt. We would pick up the pieces, deal with the ongoing aftershocks, and get on with things again.

Little did we know what was in store for us six months later...