Before and After - from the sky!

They have just released satellite pictures of Christchurch on February 24th - two days after The Big Quake.

Here's our piece of paradise before:


And after:


Not only can you see piles of rubble at each end, but you can see the four patches of our roof which are all higgeldy-piggeldy after being thrown in the air.

For the science-y among you, yesterday there was a write up in The Press by Dr John Berrill explaining why the hill suburbs (where we live) was especially hard hit. The following paragraph brought it all back for me:

...this suggests that a building, and possibly some underlying soil, would have been left behind in the air as the ground accelerated downwards beneath it, with the building then falling under it's own weight at near, but less than, 1g until it impacted on the ground, giving the high positive (upwards) acceleration.

Well it turns out there was a reason it felt like we were being thrown up and down in the air - we were.

(to read the full report, visit www.csi.net.nz - his report has some cute hand-drawn images illustrating what happened which never made it into his article).