Durban - A former Durban resident has told how the massive earthquake that rocked New Zealand at the weekend shook her Wellington home for a terrifying minute and left them in the grip of fear as the aftershocks followed.
Jacqueline Marriah, 34, said she had gone to bed at about 11.30pm and had just fallen asleep when the “awful” earthquake, which registered 7.5 on the Richter scale, struck.
“At first I thought I was dreaming,” she said.
A shaken Marriah told the Daily News that her home, which is on top of a hill normally shakes because of the strong winds.
But she realised this was different as she felt the house rock violently for about a minute.
The mother of two said she tried to rush downstairs to her children and see how they were doing but so strong was the shaking she had to use both her hands to grip the stair rail.
When she reached her 6-year-old daughter Bella’s room, she saw that she was still asleep and was none the wiser, but 13-year-old son JT (Jared Thomas) “looked like he had seen a ghost”.
She said the violent aftershocks that followed kept them up for more than an hour afterwards.
Marriah, who has lived in New Zealand for two years, said people near her home ran outside despite the authorities having told them to stay indoors.
The business analyst said the windows of the building opposite her place of work, in the central business district, were shattered.
Marriah said parts of Wellington were evacuated because of a tsunami alert.
She said although New Zealanders had been through a few big earthquakes in recent years, they had not heard such a loud rolling sound in a long time.
She said locals were trying to deal with what had happened.
Marriah has experienced a few earthquakes in New Zealand but it had taken the weekend’s quake to wake her up to the need to ensure survival packs at her home were up to scratch.
New Zealand’s ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management said: “Around midnight on Monday 14 November a magnitude 7.5 earthquake occurred 15km north-east of Culverden in the South Island, at a depth of 15km.”
The department said there had been several aftershocks.
And just hours after the first massive quake, a second quake happened northeast of Christchurch, on the South Island, at a depth of 10km. The tremor came at around 1.45pm local time today.
The department issued a tsunami alert and told people to move to higher ground and stay away from beaches. Waves of about 2.5m were reported in the country.
Aftershocks which some were as high as 5.2 were felt in parts of the country being reported by GeoNet which monitors earthquakes in New Zealand.
In 2011, 185 people died when an earthquake which registered 6.3 on the Richter scale.
Daily News