Wow...
It's the first time I hear about quakes in New Zealand. Do you get a few there?
From the newspaper, seems like people fared better than architecture. From the looks of it, I see most of those buildings were not reinforced against earthquakes.
Here in Taiwan, we get a lot of them, my strongest so far has been 6.1 I can imagine that a 7.1 had to shake quite a bit! Over here they say that many little quakes are better then a big one once a while.
Kiwis, take care!
