My first earthquake

Just a week after I move into a highrise apartment, Auckland has its biggest earthquake since 1970.

Fortunately, it was still small, only 4.5 on the Richter scale, 15km down (very shallow) and 40km away. But still, being on the 15th floor of a 38 story building, it was scary. I've never felt one in Auckland before, and I only have a very dim memory of a small one as a child at my grandparents house.

I didn't realise it was an earthquake at first. My building at work is very old, and every time a big truck thunders past it's the equivalent of at least a 3 on the Richter scale, so I'm fairly used to that. For the first second, I thought it was just a truck going past. Then I realised that it couldn't be, since the shaking was worse, this is a brand new building, and I'm 15 stories above the street. My next thought was that something was wrong with the building. I didn't think the whole building was collapsing or anything like that, but it is a new building, and I thought maybe a balcony railing had collapsed or fallen down near the pool.

It was only after it had been shaking for about 3 or 4 seconds that I realised that it was an earthquake. There was no up and down movement, just horizontal, but everything seemed to be moving both side-to-side and back-and-forth at the same time. My monitor was shaking, the desk was shaking, and I could feel the walls and floor all moving.

I remembered my earthquake drills - you're supposed to get under a desk or in a doorway. I jumped into the bathroom doorway, since it is the furthest away from the balcony, but even as I did, I was thinking that it wouldn't matter where I was standing if the whole building collapsed. I stood in the doorway as the shaking subsided. I think it probably lasted around 8-10 seconds, although it seemed much longer at the time.

As soon as it stopped, I stepped out into the corridor to see if anyone was evacuating or anything like that, but on seeing no sign of anyone, I stepped back inside and hopped onto the computer. Geonet had a report of a magnitude 3.7 earthquake off Orewa at 8:24pm, but the 9:00pm quake didn't show up on their site for another 15 minutes.

There was apparently no damage anywhere in Auckland, and Geonet say that the quakes weren't volcanic in nature. However, it is very unusual to have two such large (by Auckland standards) earthquakes so close together. Hopefully there won't be any more like those anytime soon.