East coast coasters

Hope you all heard the warning and apart from a little extra lap around the ankles no one gets their farm flooded with salt water.

I do think its interesting that the cell ph folk can send me silly txts to tell me about their latest .... money grabbing idea, but its not hooked up to civil defence to send out warnings that a tsunami is on its way... IF I hadnt walked in at that particular moment I would still not know about the earthquake etc..
and looking at the newspaper website we have changed the tide times twice that I know of... I do luv the story of the lady on the beach who wasnt going to stop her swim and said she had flippers..so could swim and escape.. excuse me which planet has she been on in the past 2 yrs

Nothing very noticeable here at Whananaki South, but we were up the hill, working in the new house. There was a fresh onshore wind and some lunatics kite-surfing despite the warnings. Tutukaka Marina was emptying out, most boats reportedly went towards the Poor Knights.

It was odd, on a sunny Sunday morning, seeing hardly any action on the estuary or bay.

I gather that the warning situation is officially over, but people are still being advised to stay away from the water. Our beach isn't very pleasant in strong Easterlies, so that's no hardship!

I pity the poor people in Chile, what a frightful quake.

It seems Chile is incommunicado, so getting hold of anyone is problematic. I have no idea if I have a much beloved live relative in Chile now or not. I must admit I wasn't too fussed about the tsunami excitement here today, being far more concerned about the mostly unreported news of whatever was known from the other side of the Pacific.

We do!

Thats good news.. Are they OK or out in the open, homeless etc

Ok. Further north, but we'd not been able to get in touch and hadn't heard anything on the news about lots of areas in Chile. I haven't heard anything about areas north of Santiago.

I was called in to our local (New Plymouth) Civil Defence Office to man the phones. We had to go through the motions, even though we were fairly certain it wouldn't have any effect on the west coast. Not surprisingly the local gauges showed no surge at all.

I'm not sure if every region has it, but ours has the Cellphone text system in place. We triggered ours on Saturday. You may remember the chaos when the system failed so badly during the Samoa Tsunami alert. It looks like it has now been fixed (I hope), but of course the XT "notwork " took an extra hour to pass on the message.

Go to the website of your local Civil Defence group - probably on your regional Council website - and "opt in" to get the messages. Then you don't have to find out about these events the hard way. The message basically just tells you to listen to your radio for details.

I'm glad there was little damage done here, but there are some very disturbing videos of the churning water as the wave hit Christchurch.

And don't get me started on the idiots who decided they know more about tectonics and pressure waves than the GNS scientists, and stood on the beach waiting for death.

But they said they knew that nothing would happen! Clever people. It would of course have been someone else's fault if they'd all been swept away by a big wave.