Earthquake Report Day 5 (26 February)

Still digging out---& it's deep

Today was another day of digging, my fourth in a row so far and it would be fair to say that I'm knackered. But we're close, I think, to completing as much as we can readily do on the digging front.

Some human stories that have arisen recently—still from the 'burbs, but just to give a little bit of the picture beyond digging out mud—include:

My neighbour Paul (the same Paul who flagged down the digger to clear out my driveway yesterday) met a woman wandering along the road who as he put it "looked almost wild." She had been shut out from her work immediately following the quake (this happened a lot where buildings were unsafe to return to) but her handbag, with her car keys, wallet etc was locked inside. So she had no money, no cards, no transport and also no water and very little food. Paul took her back to his home, where he and his wife gave her a meal, water to take away with her and  $200 to tide her over. I am sure things like this are happening all over the city right now, but this is the story I know, so I'm putting my hands together right now for Paul and his wife, Tina.
A sadder story is that of friends who own a neighbourhood cafe—Piccolo, the 'best little coffee shop in the world' for all the locals that frequented it. Forced to close for 6 weeks after the last earthquake, things were really starting to hum again. But when I walked down to see how they had fared this time, my friend Jackie said simply, "It's over." The building and their business both gone in the brief fierce seconds of the 6.3 earthquake.

Very small stories compared to the major drama playing out within the cordoned-off central area of the city: a drama of both collapsing and exploding buildings as the earthquake struck; of people who had to have limbs amputated to pull them clear of building ruins and of others being crushed in the street by falling masonry; of too many people still missing and the death toll climbing with every day that passes. These are the big stories, the ones you will see in your media coverage, but all the time the smaller events are also playing out—a very minor part of the whole earthquake drama, perhaps, but still huge for the people caught up in them.