Extract from the Newspaper

It’s just gone 1pm in the capital. The weather is fine, warm, windless and almost cloudless, a perfect summer’s day. The harbour sparkles on the Aratere arrives from Picton and a boeing 737 glides lazily overhead on its final approach to the airport. The city streets hum with traffic and Lambton Quay is bustling with lunchtime crowds. At exactly 1.05pm, flocks of pigeon suddenly fly into the air and an instant later, the city shakes sharply. The tremors are most noticeable to people in high-rise office buildings, but strong enough to quiet the conversations of those sitting outside for lunch. The shake lasts 10 nervous seconds before it is still again. One minute later comes a shuddering jolt as the city streets heave like a rug being shaken in the hallway. Manholes pop from the roadways. The web of wires for the trolley buses snaps as the poles and buildings holding it sway violently. With cracking sounds like bombs going off, curtains of glass and slabs of cladding are flung off the sides of many buildings and fall in slow motion to the streets. Panicked shoppers and workers begin to realise this is not some ordinary quake like the ones they felt in the past few weeks. Ceiling panels, power cables and air-conditioning ducts crash down over desks and shop displays. The contents of shelves are flung across floors. The lights go out and everybody who is in a lift anywhere in the central business district is stuck there. The great shake has been going for 20 seconds now. At the airport, the pilot of 737 makes and emergency ascent as she sees a series of metre-wide cracks appear in the runaway. Fires erupt spontaneously all over town as gas mains rupture. Office workers struggle to get under their desks as the shaking continues for what seems like an eternity, but it is now 40 seconds. In the streets it is a nightmare trying to dodge falling glass and masonry. In the railways yards, two spans of the motorway collapse. The loss of power to the city strands the 1pm suburban train from the city to Paraparaumu deep in the second of the tunnels between Kaiwharawhara and Takapu Rd. Houses built on steep hillsides are shaken from their foundations and begin to slide. On the harbour, passengers on the Aratere watch in horror as the ferry terminal building collapse. Further out from the CBD, many of the road and rail bridges in the Hutt Valley collapse as do several older buildings there and from Johnsonville north through Porirua to Kapiti. Massive landslides block the Hutt Rd, the Ngauranga Gorge, State Highway1 at Pukerua Bay and Rimutaka Hill Rd, cutting off access routes. After 80 seconds of shaking, there is a deafening silence in the city that is quickly ended by a cacophony of burglar; fire and car alarms going off, followed by the screams of panicking people. The Wellington fault has just ruptured, the epicentre of the magnitude 7.8 quake 20 kilometres below Petone. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people are trapped in the buildings, many of them are injured or killed by fallen ceilings, walls and furniture. Tens of thousands are reaching for landline and mobile phones to call loved ones, but all the phones have been knocked out. When it seems that no further tremor is imminent, tens of thousands pour out of offices, shops, factories, schools and damaged homes to discover streets are impassable by motor vehicle and, in many cases, in the city, even on foot. Many dazed, start walking toward distant homes.