How did you fare after the earthquake? Things looked pretty shaken up from what I saw in the papers.

Well, Rangiora didn't really get damaged. Christchurch was built mostly on swamp, same as Kaiapoi, (slightly south of us), but Rangiora was built on gravelly sort of stuff. Although, most of my friends live in Chch, and they had lots of stuff happen, like liquefaction, which is water rising from the ground, bringing up mud with it, and ruined carpets and the like, and some peoples roads were just destroyed. Bridges twisted, stuff like that. We had a friend living in Woodend (slightly north of us), whose house was made unliveable, pipes broke, foundations moved, things like that. Another family of friends in Chch had their house split in two, which was really hard for them, because the dad had built it from the ground up, but they found a new house really quickly, luckily.

Good to hear you managed to make it through relatively unscathed. As a resident of New Orleans (since a few months after Katrina), I can testify to the risks of building a city in swampy and/or sub-par areas. I suppose it's fortunate their weren't more casualties than there might have been in Chch (property damage sucks, but if you can walk away from it in one piece, it's not a total loss).

I think the only thing that stopped more losses were the strict building standards we have here. I'm just glad that so few people were hurt

Oh hey, another Kiwi. I'm from up in Orcland.

And yeah, it's pretty fortunate. Similar quakes in other parts of the world have killed thousands. This one had one death, to a heart attack. I have to applaud you Cantabrians, both on how prepared you all were and how well you coped afterward.

Hi, and thanks, on behalf of all of us, but remember, all of NZ did something to help, with donations, workforces and the like.

I am form Scotland

Sacramento, CA here. Today was actually kind of pleasant at 75F. Much better than last weekends' 106.

Universal City, Texas.

A small county tucked away in the south west of England called Cornwall. That is Cornwall the county in England and not the town in NY state, which I found by complete accident.

It's building up to tourist season and I'm not looking forward to the increase of zombie traffic on the roads. I call it zombie traffic because I swear the tourists leave their brains at home when driving down here.

It would be interesting to do a survey on road traffic accidents in the county per thousand population (the population of Cornwall roughly triples in tourist season) in the winter and in the summer and see if there's any differences.