I was about 13, remember afterwards walking through our 2-acre paddock in Belfast, and finding a crumpled piece of roofing iron. it didn’t come from any buildings nearby, it turned out later to be a section of roof from Johns rd Service Station, which is over a mile away from us!

I remember this day as well. What amazed me was how many trees were blown over. Entire plantations from ashburton to CH CH were flattened. The next door neighbors concrete block shed was flattened and the wind sounded like thunder. Scary for a nine year old.

Yes.
The “Big Blow” as it was called.
I can remember driving a train up from Timaru on that morning and the wind was that strong that it hindered the speed of the train even though I had the DJ loco in full power with a not a full load. I can remember around Ealing seeing a wheat silo moving across a paddock glistening in the moon-light.
We only got as far as Hinds as the railway and the road was closed because of trees and powerlines across the road/tracks.

JohnGaul
NZThS

According to the climate monthly summary for that month, gusts reached 105 knots (195kph) on the Kaikoura peninsula. For many years afterwards felled trees could be seen near the edges of SH1 between Ch’ch and points south.

I still remember it vividly as an 11 year old. We lived in Lowcliffe (near Ashburton) at the time. We watched corrugated iron get wrapped around power poles, our water tank blown over, chook-shed decimated, our fibrolite garage blasted outward all over the paddock. Even the old house lifting from its piles, and it felt as if the walls were breathing! We feared to go outside because of the flying sheets of iron.
We had no power or phone for a week and because we had a wet-back fire, our job as kids was to go down the road to a flattened pine forest and collect pine-cones for firewood, and I remember seeing sheep and cows killed that had sheltered under the trees that fell.

Mid-Canterbury saw flying sheets of roofing iron and tree branches hitting houses and empty steel grain silos blown several kilometres across country. They smashed through rows of trees and ‘bouncing’ dozens of metres as they went. It was possible to look down the track of their travel as there were straight lines across the landscape.

Many freshly sown crop paddocks ‘blew’ and flying soil filled the sky and entering houses, with up to a centimetre deep of dirt on carpets and furniture. Outside soil piled up in the lee of fences and buildings. It was possible to walk up the heaped soil and stand upto a metre high almost at the level of the top of the gorse hedges.

Complete rows of mature pine trees where blown down (and now irrigation has finished off the survivors!). Power was out for weeks so we’ll see how well the ‘centre-pivots’ cope next time there’s a real ‘nor-west’ blow!.