Well, that's actually a lie. We awoke to darkness, and made a quick dash for the door. This is the aftermath - the chests of drawers fell after we reached the door. (Bedroom door is visible open at top left, the door on the right is the wardrobe).
Somehow our emergency torch had managed to stay on top of the kitchen bookshelf. Next stop was into the library:
We had guests there that needed rescuing:
(Okay, we should have had the shelves screwed to the wall. We hadn't quite got that far...)
A brief investigation into the dining room showed that wooden wall-fixed wine racks seem to work much better than metal free-standing ones:
Impressively, there were only 3 broken wine bottles and one broken whisky bottle (nearly empty anyway). There was also a wine bottle with a cracked lid, which was only discovered later.
The loom appears to be perfectly fine. I'm not particularly surprised though - I think it would have taken something big falling on it to even have a chance of denting it.
We then had a while of sitting around listening to the radio. The reports started with some helpful observations like 'Possibly an earthquake, maybe somewhere in the South Island'. There were also people phoning in with descriptions, and I think the most accurate (although possibly not very helpful) was that it was like the Napier earthquake simulator at Te Papa...
As the sky started to get lighter we managed to listen in surprise to the continuing lack of fatalities. I had been a bit worried about my workplace - playing with molten metal is a fairly important part of it, and that didn't seem like a good thing to be doing at the time. (Apparently they ran through it, and were not very badly affected at all).
After it was light we went and had a look outside. A bit of minor house damage, a few cracked windows etc. The houses on our street seem to look okay too, although the street has developed some terrain:
There is a quite impressive slump in the road (no actual cracking) a block further on than these photos too.
In conclusion: Wooden buildings are fabulous. Our Civil Defence and local authorities have been doing a Very Good Job. I prefer not to wake up before dawn. It's important to have an accessible emergency torch. It's surprising how quickly you can come to ignore tremors of around magnitude 4-5. It's not surprising how quickly you can get sick of said tremors. The weaving will probably be delayed a bit longer.
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