7.1 Magnitude Earthquake hits New Zealand South Island.

This morning sometime after 3AM a giant earthquake hit the South Island and my word, those things are insanely destructive. Here's a before and after of Christchurch's Repertory Theatre.

The writing saying Before and After is a lot smaller than I thought it would be...
Here's a link showing how extensive the damage is http://www.crashbang.co.nz/quake040910/index.html

In places the road has actually split and lifted in two different directions. There's a picture in the above link that portrays Christchurch youth perfectly, a group of drunken boys standing over a gap in the road. Oi Vey.

My 94 year old Great Grandmother lives in a town just south of Chch so I thought I'll be a good granddaughter and call her to make sure she's ok.
One problem here.
I couldn't find her phone number anywhere.

You would think by now that there would be online phone directories which I could search for numbers outside my region? Nope. Business directories sure but residential?Nada.

I found Dad who was finally able to find her number in his cellphone.
Call her to discover she's fine, she was awake when the quake hit so was able to stay in bed and not be in the way of falling objects.

So Nana's fine haha my cousin called her at 5AM to make sure she was ok. My aunt was meant to fly to Sydney this morning but all flights have been grounded so no air hostessing for her today.

The good thing in all of this is that, so far, there have been no fatalities and only two people have been admitted to hospital with serious injuries. In a city of 30,000 people that's pretty good figures.

Dad poked his head in while I was on the phone to Nana and cheerily informed us we're next.

The length of New Zealand runs along a massive, highly active fault line and so earthquakes are nothing strange but a normal earthquake would be around 4 on the Richter Scale so 7.1 is huge.

The Earthquake Commision keep telling us "the big one" is coming. After this large one in Chch we can expect it to now hit Wellington because Wellington is the city which sits most on the fault line, does that make sense? Other cities aren't on the fault line as much as we are, that's what I mean.
Chch is lucky because most of it is very flat but Wellington is built almost entirely on hill sides and all of those hills as well as our main highway are directly on top of the fault line.
So basically if "the big one" hits, we're screwed haha

This post is more informative than humourous but these are pretty serious concerns