The Kaikōura earthquake struck ten years ago today, on November 14, 2016.
This magnitude 7.8 event killed two people and caused infrastructure collapse across the South Island. The rupture began near Waiau and tore through 20 different faults, isolating communities for weeks.
Gary Morton was at home in Mt Lyford when the shaking began shortly after midnight. He had been watching an Adam Sandler movie. He woke to let his dog out and experienced the violent 7.8 magnitude tremor.
“She was following me and then, bang, my house went up two and a-half metres in the air,” Morton said.
His partner, Jo-Anne MacKinnon, collided with his back as the house was thrown. She died in his arms 14 hours before rescuers could reach them.
“I tried to bring her back to life as best I could,” Morton said.
“It was just awful. I kept having this nightmare all the time, just this non-stop nightmare. I could have saved her, if this had happened, if that had happened, I kept reliving it. I just couldn’t get it out of my brain.” He later rebuilt the log cabin but moved to Christchurch after being diagnosed with cancer.
Albert Louis Edgar, 74, also died when his Elms Homestead was struck by debris.
The quake triggered tens of thousands of landslides. It cut off State Highway 1 and buried the main north rail line in over 100 places.
Tracks were lifted and thrown 50 to 100 metres into the sea. KiwiRail locomotive engineer Wayne Sullivan was driving a freight train south toward Kaikōura when the tremors began.
“As I approached the tunnel I could see sort of silt and dust falling from the ceiling and it made me realise it was an earthquake,” Sullivan said. “I was like, ‘okay, throw the brake on and stop because this is pretty big’. I didn’t want to keep going not knowing what the condition of the track was in ahead of me.”
At the peak of the rebuild, 360 workers lived in temporary accommodation villages built in and around Kaikōura. Others were housed in Cheviot and Blenheim.
KiwiRail is working to rebuild the Main North Line ten years after the Kaikōura earthquake. The project involved replacing 19,000 sleepers and realigning seven miles of track. It also involved destressing 57 miles of track.
“That was the real question, is the damage too big to even consider reopening the line?” Daniel Headifen, KiwiRail general manager of project delivery, said. “The next question after that was, if you couldn’t reopen that line, what becomes of the South Island railway?”
KiwiRail Chief Executive Peter Reidy said the recovery was an unprecedented challenge for the national transport network. The line was eventually re-established. Restricted freight services resumed in September 2017 and passenger trains returned in December 2018.
KiwiRail also expanded its Spring Creek freight hub near Blenheim to support operations. According to government data, a $17.5 million business support package for Kaikōura, Hurunui, and Wellington was provided. This included $5 million in primary sector support. Additional funding was directed toward restoring the South Bay harbour, paying off the Kaikōura Health Centre loan, and commissioning marine recovery research.
Derrick Millton, a farmer near the Clarence River mouth, became a global figure after aerial photos showed three of his cattle stranded on a small island of grass.
The animals were in a state of total shock. Millton’s wife, Jane, later wrote a children’s book, Moo and Moo and the Little Calf Too. Millton said the Ministry of Primary Industries commended the family for how they handled the situation.
Scientists have used the decade since the event to refine seismic models. Earth Sciences NZ earthquake geologist Kate Clark said the quake ruptured faults from Waiau to Cape Campbell. The coastal uplift reached up to eight metres in some locations.
“Why did this earthquake grow to be so large, rupture so many faults, why didn’t it just stop as a small magnitude 6.5 down in Canterbury, what enabled it to propagate and grow larger and larger as it linked up lots of faults as it travelled to the north?” Clark said.
The lessons from 2016 are now applied to planning for a potential Alpine Fault earthquake. Scientists estimate it has a 75 percent chance of occurring in the next 50 years.
According to volcanologist Graham Leonard, the 2016 event changed the understanding of how multiple faults can rupture simultaneously. KiwiRail has since improved its emergency bridging capability, weather forecasting, and train management processes.
“Global scientists learned a lot from this too,” Leonard said. “We realised that these large earthquakes can actually be across many faults at the same time.”
As the community marks the 10-year anniversary, Millton reflected on the recovery. “I think we’re all back to where we should be, apart from the odd scar on the farm and here and there, and we’ve got some much better assets and better roads and better things in Kaikōura,” he said.