> I have 4 levels above me, hiding under a table
> wasn't going to do shit to save me [...] food
> has fallen off all the shelves,
The usual advice is to boil the water if there is any doubt. For sediment, a coffee filter first wouldn't be a terrible idea.
Edit to add: immediately after an event, if you have a tank water heater, the water in the tank was already there. If you shut off the intake valve and turn off the heater, you have enough drinking water to last for a couple of weeks. Assuming you can get a container under the drain valve on the side. Triple check you have turned off the furnace before draining any significant amount water!
Have water on hand beforehand! It's not like bottles of water aren't for sale everywhere.
We've got a small collection of life straws/survival supplies for tramping, which is good, but they're in a part of the house that'd be inaccessible in a major event :/.
Only sort of. We have the whole dynamic of pushing out the date buildings are supposed to be meeting requirements, and dodgy engineers signing off on buildings that are below target NBS.
Most of the out of date buildings are empty, there are still a few empty buildings around Wellington because they don't meet code.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ncu7cINaZiE/TtGHnDoH72I/AAAAAAAAAS...
That's the yellow sticker that buildings in Wellington get if they're unsafe but still usable.
It looks like the quoted epicentre was just the start point of the rupture that headed off to the northeast. Which explains why the shaking seemed worse to the north and why so much activity seems to be recorded from the Seddon area again:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us1000778i#...
In Wellington it seemed like the first half was just a gentle swaying before it really kicked in for the second half. That was probably the rupture moving closer.
I found this really interesting: The USGS talks about quakes of this magnitude usually have a wide scale area of slippage eg they've modelled 200x60 km for this one:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us1000778i#... http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us1000778i#...
~200km?
Also in Wellington, and it's work from home day today here while engineers check the building for damage.
We were evacuated and let back in. All the planning in the world doesn't prepare you for the real thing, the first thing you're meant to do is keep calm, and I sure as hell didn't. I sprinted right the fuck out of my apartment building, I have 4 levels above me, hiding under a table wasn't going to do shit to save me.
The building has some cracks in the plaster and food has fallen off all the shelves, but nothing serious. The water seems to be running a bit brown though, so maybe some damage to the water pipes.
Props to the crew at Bizdojo (http://www.bizdojo.com/) for opening an invitation for us to come and chill there if we couldn't get back into our homes. Doing the right thing there!