New Zealand 7.2 Earthquake

I am so glad that I took geology! As many of you that know me well, I sorta geeked out when I took that class. (ask my kids, I was annoying - constantly restating facts) Did you know that modern door jams are not built any stronger than any other part of the house, so if an earthquake hits... 
Drop! Get under a table and hold on!

This earthquake has helped me get more organized. We had a sit down with the kids with "what to do" and "where to meet if we are separated"  I feel more venerable here now because I really don't have and "emergency contact" for my children if something was to happen.  Not having family or friends around during a natural disaster is unsettling to me.

But, I have started my Emergency Earthquake Kit!
Luckily, we brought all our backpacking gear to New Zealand, and since we only brought the essentials for a year - our documents are with us too. Here is list and link;

WATER | FOOD
FIRST AID | TOOLS, SUPPLIES | SANITATION
CLOTHES, BEDDING | DOCUMENTS

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/earthquakes/archive/ready.dtl#ixzz0z35VXUAq

I getting together enough water for week for my family and food stashes. The water is tainted in Christchurch now and people's lives are turned upside down.  My heart goes out to all those people that lost their business and homes.

http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/asiapacific/news/article_1582237.php/Massive-quake-damages-New-Zealand-city-of-Christchurch-VIDEO

When we moved to New Zealand we were told that Earthquakes happen here often. 
New Zealand is located on a Continental Plate Fault line,. so on September 3 –  We had our first experience with a massive Earthquake!

A powerful magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck New Zealand near Christchurch, the largest city in that country’s South Island with a population of about 375,000 people.
Aftershocks continued to shake the South Island's biggest city as emergency services were flooded with calls and police urged residents not to use mobile phones and to stay indoors.
Police shut down the central business district, where roads were reported blocked by the facades of collapsed buildings and broken glass. -

 (This image from http://www.monstersandcritics.com/)
Luckily, there were no reports of deaths or serious injuries and no tsunami warning was issued.
The quake was felt hundreds of kilometers away and civil defense officials said the national crisis management center in Wellington had been activated.
Christchurch International Airport was closed and the South Island rail network was shut down pending inspections for damage.
The quake was felt widely across the South Island and in the capital Wellington, at the southern tip of the North Island.

Damage in downtown Christchurch - ( image and info cited from - http://www.news.com.au/world/strong-earthquake-leaves-nz-trembling/story-e6frfkyi-1225914069084)

We live in Dunedin, so we felt the quake at 4:30am. John layed in bed watching things shake, but I went back to sleep.

Convergent boundaries - which we are located on... are "active margins" that occur where two plates slide towards each other commonly forming either a subduction zone (if one plate moves underneath the other) or an orogenic belt (if the two simply collide and compress).
(Cross section by José F. Vigil from This Dynamic Planet -- a wall map produced jointly by the U.S. Geological Survey, the Smithsonian Institution, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.)