NZ is doing it’s best impression of dice in a cup tonight as there are earthquakes happening all over the place. There was a 7.5 quake in the top of the South Island a couple of hours ago and they’ve been continuing ever since. Now there is also a tsunami warning for low lying areas along the whole of the east coast of the country. Hopefully no one has been or will be killed or badly hurt.
My Mum lives only a few hundred yards from the beach, at Mount Maunganui on the east cost. So I just had to phone her and wake her up to tell her that she might want to think about spending the rest of the night at my sister’s place which is further inland and higher up.
Not fun! Stay safe NZ, I miss you today.
Thanks Joy.
It’s insane. The GeoNet website is reporting earthquake after earthquake after earthquake, a lot of them strong and some severe. Let’s pray it’s not a build up to something really devastating. http://www.geonet.org.nz/quakes/felt
The NZ civil defence website just upgraded their tsunami warning to include the Bay of Plenty which is where my Mum is. I phoned her back to make sure she was leaving and she said the tsunami sirens were going off. There’s nothing quite like trying to calm your panicking mother from 12000 miles away.
If anyone knows anyone who lives in low lying areas near the east coast of NZ call them now and tell them to get to higher ground.
I hope your Mum has got to somewhere safe Melanie, it must be awful when you’re so far away.
Thanks Dawn.
I just heard from her that, for her area at least, the tsunami warning has been downgraded to a beach and waterways warning rather than a land warning. So if there are higher waves than normal they are now predicting that they won’t be a danger to life there.
Down in the top of the SI and the bottom of the NI it’s a different matter though. They have seen some waves of 2.5 metres all ready and high tide is coming in another couple of hours. Hopefully everyone can get out and away and the damage will be minimal.
Meanwhile there are still earthquakes happening. Although they appear to be lessening in strength now. Fingers crossed.
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My nephew and his fiancee are in NZ at the moment (only a couple of days into a 2 week stay) they sent a message to my sister after the initial quake to say they were OK. Not sure if they’ll have to change their plans as my nephew had a seminar then they were visiting his fiancee’s Aunt and after that they were visiting a few of the tourist spots 
Only just seen this, hope everyone’s relation’s are ok
The worst affected areas were around Kaikoura in the top of the SI, which is where the epicentre of the big 7.5 quake was.
There were 2 people killed as a result of the big earthquake. Quite a lot of damage from it and the subsequent shocks and thousands of people who had to evacuate from their homes due to the tsunami fears. There is a large fault line that runs diagonally up the side of the country. It was part of this fault line that shifted causing the quakes and the initial fear was that there had been a massive underwater landslide along other parts of the fault that had the potential to cause a tsunami all along the east coast.
Thankfully that didn’t eventuate. There were some larger than normal waves in areas close to the epicentre and other areas had slightly higher water levels than normal. A lot of people spent the night sitting on the top of hills though!
Just heard from my sister, they’ve moved my nephew’s conference further south away from the main area affected, apparently they didn’t even feel the second quake and thankfully they sound to be away from coastel areas (but they’ve got emergency bags packed just in case the situation changes) 
