Good evening how are you? Is the sound rolling? - hopefully not.
Good evening this is Chipper reporting from Heathcote.
The biggest thing that I remember was shaking. I woke up there's incredible shaking, noise um
that sort of noise,
and the bed just being shaken around I
put my arm around Rachel and said "it's just an earthquake it's just an earthquake".
It was so forceful. What was amazing was not that it was an earthquake it was just that you were
bouncing around, literally bouncing on the bed! And everything was black, everything was dark.
It was like on a trampoline.
And there was just the noise of things breaking and I thought "God!" You know windows are going,
the doors where they don't fit properly were just banging - bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang!
The gib board made this base sound - woh woh woh woh woh, So it'
was an incredible - just - racket. You've just woken up and you just don't know what's going on.
It sounded like the train - there's a train that often comes in the night not too far away from
here - but this was louder and it felt like it was coming right through the middle of the house.
So it got louder and louder and then suddenly I realized that we were moving
but it wasn't an up and down sort of movement it was more like a violent swaying backwards and
forwards. It was very violently going back and forth and then as you registered that,
you could hear all the other noises in the house as things started to fall down.
Then it stopped and there was an incredible swaying. We had no power, phone was off.
Then we decided to move off the bed and quickly into the living room. It was very
dark. I remember it being eerily dark for that time of the morning. Charles found the torches
so we had torches and I had my cell phone, and he also found a radio with batteries.
I got a torch and then we came through and everything's on the floor, things had fallen over.
The shock came in later and I think we both experienced our bodies getting very cold
and probably half an hour later as I put three pairs of socks on. I had a duvet wrapped around
me and I still felt cold. I noticed my body temperature started to drop and then I started
to sort of get tight and it's just fear kicking in afterwards. Your brain starts thinking about
it afterwards you think where could I go or what could i do? Well you can't go anywhere.
And it's the feeling of you just totally having this thing done to you. That you can't you can't
get out of it you don't know where to go or what to do. To the point where I started to just
had to breathe deeply and think "Well it's just an earthquake Charles, you just have to go with it"
And then there seemed to be a long, long waiting time and in a sort of stunned silence
listening to the radio and sitting on the couch and just feeling very cold and
waiting for daylight really. But as soon as it got light I went to the end of our drive
and met two of our neighbors and then went to check on our 80 year old neighbour
and stayed about half an hour clearing up glass and just talking to him.
Then there was all the aftershocks so after a while you started to get a little bit on edge.
Because the first one actually was less scary because you weren't expecting it and you were
just in it and you sort of dealt with it, but then the next time it happened and the next time,
your body was getting ready to - it sort of reacted more. And
days later people I met they talked a lot about the incredible tiredness. And not just from
not sleeping properly, sort of like everybody's bodies were on high alert
and it became quite draining after a while. And still now we don't know when it's going to stop.
We can't do anything about this, nobody can go along and turn off the earthquake.
We can't ask somebody to stop it. The same thing is going on within our bodies - is that we can't
stop a fear thing happening. You can override it by being positive, but the chemicals in your body
have suddenly been kicked into gear - adrenaline, whatever it is that's happening, and your body
starts to sort of shake in a funny sense. You sort of feel frightened, you feel frightened.
So there's there's been a lot of background flow-on from not just experiencing the actual
quake. Talking to friends who've lost their businesses, who can't enter the buildings
in town, the stress that it's sort of beginning to show on them
and people really unsure with what's going to happen for them in the future.
And as well as just people feeling sad about icons around town not looking the same at all
again or even physical landscape where places like Castle Rock has fallen to pieces. There's a lot of
changes around the environment. The historic pub in Heathcote has had to be demolished
and things that people have known and take for granted are just not there anymore.