Day Seven

it felt like i woke every hour last night.  the after shocks were relentless.  in actual fact they weren't, so i was either dreaming them, or imagining them...that can't be good.
i was helping out in a friend's husband's office this morning, so it helped me take my mind of things, but also made me appreciate somewhat more, what people are going through.  it's a structural engineering office, so there were many a phone call by worried people needing assessments done on their damaged homes and or businesses.  they guys in the office had been working almost non-stop since 7am last saturday.  Day 7 and they were pretty exhausted.
seeing the list of all the places that needed repair, assessment, or are beyond it.  this is just a small office, yet there were so many jobs. 
i took a call from a lady that sounded as though she was at breaking point.  her house had been holding up really well until the big aftershock, and then every after shock since then just seemingly was adding that little bit more damage.  she was pretty distressed, understandable after she told me she'd just spend 16 months renovating the 100yr-old cottage.
after i had spent time helping out there i went for a drive to halswell, one of the worst hit suburbs in chc.  it was one of the first areas that the student volunteers went to, and boy, it looks clean.  i can only imagine what it was like last saturday.
piles of silt still remain. workers slowly finish shoveling what appears to be the last of it, off the streets at least.  fields are still covered by the mini eruptions.
the streets are badly damaged here too, similar to avonside drive.  cracks and canyons litter the landscape, large and small.  the school here is teetering on the edge of being condemned and salvageable.  all the students are having to be relocated, at this stage to other schools.  later in the day i see the tv news and it is one of the main stories, anne tolley had even been out to visit that morning.  they have found a site for the whole school to be relocated to, so all the kids will be kept together, which is just so awesome.
outside the main office stood the freshly cut stump of a huge tree, which after looking at a plaque across the courtyard from it commemorating an anniversary in the school's history, had me wondering whether this tree was perhaps planted when the school was opened.
i soon had this confirmed as i spoke to the security guard that has the task of ensuring no one enters the site.  it looks relatively harmless from the outside, as do so many buildings in the chc region, but as i saw on the news this evening, the outside it deceiving....inside there are major cracks.  one of the larger aftershocks was right under the school.
anyway the security guard told me that the tree was ripped apart and had to be cut down as it was leaning over the power lines outside the school.  it was about 140 years old, the kaumātua, guardian of the school and now that it is gone, perhaps that is not so great for the school.  from the few families that passed by as i was standing talking to him, there is a great sense of community at that school so lets hope they find a new guardian and the damage can be repaired.