Skip to main content

Story: Historic earthquakes

Early morning quake

Te Ara coming soon placeholder
Diane Jordon was in bed in her Christchurch home when the magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck in the early morning of Saturday 4 September 2010.

4:30 a.m. awake in bed the earthquake struck. A violent jolt, deafening noise, like a train thundering round and round. The house moved in all directions including up and down. Could not get out of bed, when I did, the floor seemed to not be there, I fell, bruised the front of my body. Unable to stand. I crawled out to an external door. It was freezing, I put some clothes on over my pyjamas plus a coat. The noise, glass, banging, plus terrible rumbling noises. Cannot stand, quake now shaking, I stand, hold on so tightly to door frame for fear of falling over. Shaking mild, I get a mouthful of water. I am so scared. I need to defecate. I know aftershocks are coming, I go to the toilet and try to be real quick, then big quake again, I hold on real tight to sliding ranch doors. Noise is awfully loud. I ring emergency on mobile. No response for some time, then ... husband rings me back, I am so scared, I am crying, another strong quake comes. Scary. Goes on and on. Then another big quake hits. Three quakes are so strong, I go next door to check a neighbour and I notice the bird bath is solid ice.
 

Using this item

Private collection

This item has been provided for private study purposes (such as school projects, family and local history research) and any published reproduction (print or electronic) may infringe copyright law. It is the responsibility of the user of any material to obtain clearance from the copyright holder.

All images & media in this story

How to cite this page

Eileen McSaveney, Historic earthquakes – The 2010 Canterbury (Darfield) earthquake, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/community-contribution/32302/early-morning-quake (accessed 4 June 2026).

Story by Eileen McSaveney, published 14 March 2011, updated 1 November 2017.

Comments

Gee
12 March 2012
cool story bro
Matthew
16 June 2011
I awoke with my wife telling me to get up. I got out of bed and made my way to our bedroom door to put on my dressing gown, at this moment my wife told me that she was going to get our daugther who was asleep still. I then went to our safe point which was two metres from the entrance to our daughters room. While I was standing there I turned on the hall light and then saw my dialysis machine rolling back and forth across the carpet in the lounge. The motion reminded me so much of being on a twenty foot cat in about one metre of chop that i started to sing "Proud Mary". I managed to sing "rolling, rolling, rolling on the river" then i relized that my wife had not turned up so I headed to my daughter's room and found my wife lying on the floor with my daughter. At this point i could not understand why she had decided to this as I was thinking to myself "if you're going to change your plans and take cover at least lie next to something, and not in the middle of the floor". I asked her what she was doing, and she replied "I fell over". By this time the shaking had decreased to what I would estimate to be about a magnitude 5. Shortly after the quake subsided we went outside and the next thing I remember was hearing all the alarms going off, which was something quite amazing within its self.