Story: Historic earthquakes

Most of the roads close to Murchison were impassable after the earthquake. The figure surrounded by fallen blocks gives an idea of how difficult travel was.

Transcript

Unidentified man: The most awe-inspiring piece of the whole thing was a slip that came out across the valley from where we were working - we were working on a terrace. And this slip came out of the standing bush and it looked exactly like someone pouring a huge sack of sugar down the hill, with it boiling over and over. It took the trees in as they went and they'd disappear and farther down the hill they would come out just naked limbs or naked trunks, the limbs was broken off, the bark skinned off, and the whole thing just ground more or less to pulp.

Narrator: And Mrs Nelson was living a few miles up the Murchison Valley when tragedy came to a brave settler's wife.

Mrs Nelson: I went up course, I said to mother, I'll bring her down to have a cup of tea. So I went up and of course found that they had been caught by the quake and he was dead. She was there with him not wanting to come away and covered with mud you couldn't see who they were. They'd been right under it, presumably the mud from the water from the river had mixed with the earth on the flats and it was deep mud. And her clothes, which she said were quite good in clothes, and they were just in rags. So, I persuaded her to come down with me and now she came and she climbed up quite a steep bank and walked down the road for easily a quarter of a mile and then said to me, 'do you think I've hurt my ankle, I think it must be broken? And I said, well you couldn't walk all this way on a  broken ankle and not no, but evidently she was so shocked that until then she hadn't felt it. But it was broken.