To Christ Church and The Earth Quake Destruction

We drove from Fox Glacier on the West Coast to Christ Church on the East Coast a total of about 400km as you can see in purple on the map below.

Highlights of this days trip included:

• Going up and over "Arthur Pass" which is rated #19 on the "101 Best Kiwi Weekends".  We thought that there would be gas in Arthur Pass, but we saw none so we were near empty when we left wondering what we'd encounter.
• Our next stop was at Flock Hill High Country Resort where we had lunch while we waited for someone to bring us gas from Springfield, the next town about 25km away...an expensive lesson was learned.
• We passed through a number of mountain passes and then onto the plains leading into the western edge of Christ Church. Joining the road in Darfield where our trip began 8 days previous.
• We had a few hours to spend in Christ Church so we reviewed the earthquake damage that happened on Sept. 10th, 2010 when 184 people lost their lives in the 7.1 quake.  It was amazing!  The estimated damage is in the $20-$30 Billion range.  Since that time they have had repeat earthquakes in Feb. 2011 of 6.3 and Dec. 23 (2 days before our arrival) had 4 major quakes over 5.0.  You won't believe this, but since the 2010 quake, they have had some 9,000 tremors!  Needless to say, there's a hesitancy to rebuild and the city has lost 10's of thousands of it's residents.  Most moved to Australia.
• We visited the New Brighton Pier and went up into the mountains to the south of Christ Church to look back on the city.
• We then headed to the airport, caught a little dinner, had a 4.8 quake and caught our plane back to Wellington.

This is an example of scenery we had driving back from Fox Glacier to Christ Church.

 

Here's a sample of the damage we saw from the quakes that have hit Christ Church.
 

Here we are at the New Brighton Pier on the far east coast of Christ Church.



Here's a sample of the views and scenery from the trip Fox Glacier to Christ Church

In the photo above, the little black dot below the large rock in the center is a human.  That makes the boulder about 100' tall!

Here's a sample of the distruction we saw in Christ Church.

The picture above is of the "Archives New Zealand" Christ Church office.  We were there helping the Sister Missionaries with their digitising on Tuesday & Wednesday the 31st of Jan. and the 1st of Feb..  They were in the "Red Zone" just after the 2010 quake.

We were told that the tall buildings in both of the pictures above will all have to be torn down.

This is the beach area around New Brighton Pier along with pictures of the pier.  There is a lot of fishing from the pier as you can see.