‘We clutched each other for support while the shaking continued. As soon as it stopped, we ran crying all the way back to the home. This is an experience that I will never forget.’ Paul De Rungs remembers the Wairarapa earthquake of June 1942.
An earthquake is such a sudden traumatic event that it usually becomes an enduring memory. When we invited New Zealanders to send us stories of earthquakes, we were impressed at how vividly they recalled their feelings and the details of quite minor incidents.
Here is a selection of those stories of earthquakes since 1942.
What's your story?
Worse than facing the Japanese
It was June 1942, in the early years of the Second World War. Helen Mason had just returned to Carrington, near Carterton in the Wairarapa. She is pictured at that time with her daughter at a neighbour’s picnic.
Falling bombs?
This is Paul De Rungs in 2006. In June 1942, when an earthquake struck, he was seven years old and living in an orphanage, the Anglican Boys’ Home, in Lower Hutt.
Escape from Īnangahua
The Īnangahua earthquake in May 1968 blocked roads such as this one over the Reefton saddle, photographed the next day. Lyn Taylor, her husband Cliff and their two children were living at Westport, where road blocks caused major disruption.
Aftershock
When an earthquake struck in Wellington, in November 1968, Geoff Robinson (pictured at the time) was working for the New Zealand Bankers Association in their Brandon Street offices.
An enormous bang
These violently swinging venetian blinds give some idea of the scale of the earthquake which hit Edgecumbe on 2 March 1987. For Diane Brown, working as a journalist for the Kawerau Gazette, the first sign was a reasonably small shake.
Terror on the train
The ‘Bay Express’ crosses the Ormondville viaduct on 19 July 1990, heading north to Napier on a routine journey. But at this spot almost two months earlier on 13 May, as the train travelled north from Palmerston North, disaster struck for engine driver Alan Brabender.