Kaikōura earthquake 10 years on, Digi Mart USA News (Kaikōura, New Zealand): Gary Morton and his partner Jo-Anne MacKinnon spent the night watching an Adam Sandler movie before going to bed at home in Mt Lyford when the Kaikōura earthquake struck shortly after midnight on 14 November 2016.
Morton got up to let their dog out when the violent magnitude 7.8 quake hit. “She was following me and then, bang, my house went up two-and-a-half metres in the air,” he said.
Morton was thrown out of the door and felt MacKinnon collide with his back. “I still had the damn Sky remote in my hand and I was bouncing up and down, it went for about two minutes, 20 seconds or something, which is a long time.”
When the shaking stopped, Morton went inside and called out for MacKinnon, but the power had gone out and he could not see her. He started the car and used its lights to find her lying on the ground.
“I tried to bring her back to life as best I could.” MacKinnon died in his arms. It was 14 hours before anyone reached the couple.
“It was just awful. I kept having this nightmare all the time, just this non-stop nightmare.
I could have saved her, if this had happened, if that had happened, I kept reliving it. I just couldn’t get it out of my brain,” he said.
Morton later rebuilt the log cabin in Mt Lyford, but was diagnosed with cancer not long after the earthquake and decided to move to Christchurch.
Albert Louis Edgar, 74, also died in the quake when he was struck by falling debris and crushed to death in his Elms Homestead, while dozens of other people were injured.
Near the coast, KiwiRail locomotive engineer Wayne Sullivan was driving a freight train south towards Kaikōura when it began to bang around and move from side to side. As he approached a tunnel he saw silt and dust falling from the ceiling and realised it was an earthquake.
He brought the train to a stop on the other side of the tunnel, where he sat in the cab while hundreds of aftershocks hit. Sullivan thought the Alpine Fault was rupturing and, fearing a tsunami, watched the sea in case it receded.
After an official tsunami warning, train control told him to get to higher ground.
He was picked up by a helicopter around 7am and, flying south, saw a massive pile of debris on the track near Ohau Point, which showed him the scale of the damage and how lucky he had been to stop where he did.
The main north line was so badly damaged that KiwiRail staff said they were not sure repairs would be possible. The track was buried by slips and landslides in more than 100 places.
KiwiRail and the New Zealand Transport Agency then joined forces to create North Canterbury Transport Infrastructure Recovery, which brought in contractors and engineering consultants to help restore road and rail links. At the height of the operation, around 1000 people were working on the rebuild from the Kaikōura area.
KiwiRail general manager of project delivery Daniel Headifen said there were more than 1000 points of damage along the main north line after the quake. “That was the real question, is the damage too big to even consider reopening the line?
The next question after that was, if you couldn’t reopen that line, what becomes of the South Island railway?” he said.
Some rail tunnels were completely buried by slips, and in other places the track had been picked up and thrown 50 to 100 metres into the sea. Ten months later the line was re-established in one of the biggest rail restoration projects ever completed.
Restricted freight resumed in September 2017 and the first post-earthquake passenger train ran in December 2018. State Highway 1 north of Kaikōura reopened one year, one month and one day after the quake.
Derrick Millton was in St Arnaud that night and, as more details came over the radio, he knew he had to get home to his farm near the Clarence River mouth. “We were the first car into the Kaikōura coast coming south from Ward and we had to dodge bridges that had poked out of the tar seal,” he said.
At one place there was a metre-wide gap in the road, and the crew picked up pieces of tar seal to fill it so they could cross.
Millton said the damage to Waipapa Farm, now owned by his son, was significant. “The whole hillside had fallen down and because it’s limestone, it was showing up as a white face.” Of the 600 sheep on that block, surprisingly few were lost, as they had moved off the steep part before the quake.
About 12 kilometres of fencing needed straightening, and farmers from around the district came to help. Millton’s cows and a calf made headlines worldwide in an aerial photo of the animals stranded on an island of grass after their paddock was ripped apart.
“The cows were scared, they were really suffering from the earthquake,” he said.
Former Kaikōura mayor Winston Gray said the extent of the damage was not clear at first. “At that time of the day, we were thinking we’d be closed up for a couple of weeks, we weren’t aware of what was required and that the road north would be closed for so long,” he said.
“We had so many people here in town to get out, that was one of the major problems.”
Tourists in the quake-stricken town were evacuated by helicopter, and others were taken on HMNZS Canterbury to Lyttelton. Gray said it was a struggle for many people in Kaikōura at the start of the busy summer season, with the road shut and fewer tourists around.
The government of the time provided a $17.5 million business support package for people in Kaikōura, Hurunui and Wellington, paired with $5 million in primary sector support and tourism advertising and wage subsidies. Additional funding was granted to restore the harbour at South Bay, pay off the Kaikōura Health Centre loan, support waste and debris management and commission marine recovery research.
Earth Sciences NZ earthquake geologist Kate Clark said the earthquake struck within the Marlborough fault system, which lies between the Alpine Fault and the Hikurangi Subduction Zone. It started near the North Canterbury town of Waiau and ruptured around 20 different faults, all the way to Cape Campbell on the coast.
“A lot of earthquakes just rupture one fault, this ruptured over 20, so it was kind of unprecedented,” she said. Scientists are still studying the complex quake to understand plate boundary movement across the faults.
Clark hoped the research would enable better forecasting of future earthquakes in similar settings.
A series of events is being held in Kaikōura over the weekend for people to gather and remember the 2016 quake, 10 years on.
