This is going to be short, since I've been awake for many hours. We had another pretty hellish night on the hill. At midnight we started the shift by getting the work truck stuck in a snowdrift on the way up. Took four guys 40 minutes to dig it out. When we got there the swing shift hadn't been able to do anything on account of the howling winds, so we had 2x the work. A half hour into our shift, one of our machines broke down, so we were down a machine. The roads across the hillside were erased and I had to navigate by the seat of my pants, blind, in super sketchy spots.
Then at 4:30am, we had this big earthquake. I thought my machine had malfunctioned, lost a track, or the winch cable broke, or something. It was bouncing around and rolling.
Power went out on the ski hill. They have a backup generator but it hadn't been tested in quite some time (about par for this place). Luckily the power company got it restored pretty quickly. We continued working our asses off and they opened the hill. I noticed they didn't check out the lifts, particularly. "She'll be alright, mate."
It triggered some avalanches around the mountain, but no one was nearby. The big river that runs across the plains is muddy and brown from landslides. The pictures on TV show big cracks in farmers' fields, and that the ground has shifted three meters.
The great part of it was that the weather turned absolutely stellar in the morning and I got to go ski after work. Easily the best day of the year. Icing on the cake: the two bridges across the river that separates us from Christchurch were closed for inspection. So there were only about 200 people on the hill.
I got home and my chimney has collapsed, which is a drag because I just bought a cord of wood. Also it decided to collapse on my car, but it's still driveable.
Anyhow, we were lucky compared to Christchurch, which is apparently pretty messed up at the moment. An unfortunate thing is that a nasty nor'wester is supposed to blow through tonight, with massive winds and rain that won't help the already crippled buildings. They have some small fires at the moment with no water pressure. 21 aftershocks so far, sewage running into the rivers.
No one has died though, which is pretty miraculous.
I have some pics, but they'll have to wait since I'm about to keel over from fatigue, and I have to get up in five hours to go back to work.
OK, OK, another five minutes to crop some pics:
Holy crap! Another aftershock just this moment. Gets your heart racing. Rumbling sound, lights swaying, couch bumping. Like if you're standing on a bridge and a big dump truck goes by. How am I supposed to sleep?
Stunningly gorgeous breezy morning. Christchurch in the distance, maybe 65 miles
My rig and I
Landslide into the river:
Chimney needs work.
car got abused a bit:
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