Earthquake at Link - updated September 20, 2010
Our Building bottom right
All OK everyone fine.
Broken windows, monitors and stock on floor.
Many of our homes damaged
Castle Rock, the landmark above us is now beside us! See photo. It was a popular, challenging, rock climbing attraction.
Craig our GM lives through the tunnel in Lyttelton. This is his chimney.
Simon's brick house lost some cladding
We lost a lot of windows here at Link R&D. The first is a 3m x 2m 6mm plate window in our showroom. 
The 2nd photo is in Philip's (CEO) office.
This rock from Castle Rock ended up outside the underpass to our building. It is over 2m across.
This is Philip's (CEO) pantry, the morning after
.
The worst damage is to Cameron's home. After the shaking stopped all he could hear was rushing water and on looking out there were fifty springs gushing half a meter up, as the underground aquifer had permeated the pan in a process known as "liquefaction" leaving "volcanoes" of sand.
This liquefaction process as caused the house to settle into the ground so that there is now one and a half less steps into the garden with the house now on a lean with many jammed doors.
The power pole outside Cameron's house sunk 2m into the ground
This is the street outside Cameron's home. His section has grown by over half a meter.
Cameron hired a digger and can be seen briefly on national news here
On the evening of the 6th, the day after the big quake, Philip downloaded SeisMac off the www and within ten minutes had recorded the second biggest shake of the weekend.
The day after was fathers day. Philip's six year old daughter made this card. She captured my hair and normally startled face perfectly however I am concerned by the relative size of our ice-cream sundae!
More photos of Christchurch here stuff.co.nz
Update Thursday September 9
A big magnitude 5.1 quake at 7.49am yesterday appeared to have occurred on another fault, about six kilometres deep, within 1km of Link. Simon arrived first to find double the amount of windows broken. Even though the energy of the quake was 1/30 of Saturdays its proximity caused large local damage. Power was off again and our water supply flowed out the side of the road. Structural engineers have been through and declared our building sound (but breezy). About half our staff have decided that there are better places to be with the most popular being Queenstown which is far enough away to be on a different tectonic plate.
By Thursday about 350 aftershocks had been recorded since Saturday morning's magnitude 7.1 earthquake, with more than 150 strong enough to be felt and 10 shocks more than five in magnitude.
The two damaged chimneys at Craig's home have been dismantled this morning although it did involve a visit by Craig to his elderly neighbour as she was upset, thinking that his landmark home was being demolished. Craig - "a cup of tea and a little chat settled her nerves".
To see a map animation of the quakes hitting the area click here
New windows going in, at 85 kg each, they are heavy.
The Simon's (twins) helping our headless glazier (earlier accident - nasty business)
September 20, 2010. - Blasting above Link to stablise the loosened rocks. The helicopter is placing steel nets to contain the blast
