Nana and the Napier Earthquake

It was the morning of 3 February, 1931.

My Nana, Isobel, was 14-and-a-half years old. Her family lived at Whakatu, not far from Hastings.

It had been a hot, dry summer and it was her first day back at Mangateretere School.

Everyone was outside on the field because they weren’t doing any work - it was just too hot.

But at 10.47am, disaster struck.

“It just felt as though someone had punched me right in the small of the back. I was looking around to see who had done it and I nearly had a fit when I saw the ground up there.”

Isobel and her schoolmates were knocked right off their feet.

The shaking went on for about 45 seconds, she said.

Others who felt the magnitude 7.8 quake reckoned it went on for more than two-and-a-half minutes.

The Napier earthquake remains New Zealand’s deadliest natural disaster - 256 people were killed.

Across Hawke’s Bay, the ground shook, cracked and rolled.

Huge expanses of land were pushed up out of the sea.

Napier and Hastings were in ruins - buildings crumpled and the streets were covered with debris.

In 1998, when I was almost 10, I interviewed Nana about what she saw that day - I was doing a school project about the disaster.

When it hit, she said it sounded like thunder.

Was it scary? I asked.

“It was scary alright because we didn’t realise what was going on.”

There was a lot of damage inside the school, things falling off walls and books coming off shelves.

“We saw the chimney at the Whakatu freezing works go, it was a brick one of course, and it just seemed to shoot off in the air and break in three bits and fall and there was an awful lot of dust that went up after it,” she said.

Nana’s brother picked her up from school and took her home.

Her mother was inside the house when the earthquake hit and rushed outside.

“She got to the backdoor and there was a big safe hanging there and it came and hit her,” Nana said.

“She was thrown down to the bottom of the back steps - and they were quite high and of course there was a concrete floor.”

Luckily, she ended up with just a few bumps and bruises.

But the house was a mess, Nana said.

“The wardrobe with the mirror on the door fell over. Dad went and picked it up and then it fell down again that night.

“The cupboard doors flew open and all the jam on the shelves dropped on the floor.”

Later that afternoon, Nana and her family piled into the car and headed to Napier to find out more about what had happened.

“We never realised what we were going in to because you didn’t get transistor radios those days.”

Marine Parade was covered in concrete and gravel from the beach.

But Nana stopped short of describing the damage in detail.

“It was awful because it was on fire when we got there. It was the people, they looked so bewildered.”

It looked like a warzone, she said.

Like many others, Nana and her family headed to McLean Park, where the Red Cross was set up.

“They had tents up for people whose homes were damaged and they stayed there.

“Those who wanted tents were able to get them, so my dad got one and pitched it on the lawn and we all slept in there.”

The family slept in the tent for a fortnight, as the aftershocks rolled on.

The biggest - a magnitude 7.3 - hit ten days after the initial quake.

That was the last straw for Nana’s dad.

“He’d had enough, so he sent mum and us kids on the train to Wellington and the Red Cross took over.

“They paid for the fares to go there and then they put us in a beach house in Waikanae right on the beach.”

It was no beach holiday, though - Nana and her brothers walked up the hill to school each day.

After a month away, Nana and her family returned to Hawke’s Bay.

But it was a long time before life returned to normal.

There was the mammoth task of cleaning up. Roads and infrastructure had to be repaired. Decisions had to be made about how to rebuild Napier and Hastings.

It would take years.

Nana’s memory of what happened on 3 February, 1931, never faded.

She was terrified of earthquakes for the rest of her life.

But my interview for my school project was the only time she talked to me about it.