Today is exactly one month since Canterbury was rocked by one of the nations worst ever earthquakes.

WeatherWatch.co.nz weather analyst Philip Duncan visited the region again one month on to see how things were looking and to also give some balanced photos showing the region looking as beautiful as ever.

Many corner buildings in Christchurch have suffered damage to their exterior walls..

A completely destroyed building – but note that both buildings on either side are untouched.  This is often the case.  One badly damaged building followed by a street of almost damage free buildings.

The river and parks all looked absolutely amazing under the sunny spring weather.

When I was there the morning of the quake many buildings, like this one, were damaged by at that early stage you wouldn’t have known it.  Coming back a month later the damage doesn’t see as extreme but it was certainly more widespread that I first thought.

What earthquake?  Most streets in Christchurch remain open and appear damage free.

It was definitely all the older buildings that suffered the most damage.

The most common sight of all – damaged chimneys.  Some streets every house had a chimney missing or damaged.

Note the brick wall has no damage, the street looks beautiful, but the house has a missing chimney.

This was our first glimpse of the actual fault line.  I’m standing on the top of it looking straight along it.  In the far distance, in the middle, you can see the ground raising up, but in actual fact the ENITRE paddock was raised.  The paddocks on either side were green and flat.  This one had cracks and dirt mounds all over it.

Big cracks and the fence destroyed as the ground lifted one metre here and shifted a number of metres sideways.

A new hill and a new bend in the road.  Professors from a Japanese University capture the fault line rupture.  They told us it had lifted one metre here.

A great photo which clearly shows just how much the road shifted.  Also, note the hill that has formed, to the left near the 4WD.  This road should be completely flat.

We drove the entire length of the fault line.  This was the only dramatic structure damage we saw.  Most farms looked fine.

This photo was taken in the exact epicentre of the quake, a few kilometres from Darfield.  You would never have known.

While this crack doesn’t look very dramatic compared to other images we’ve seen over the past month this one blew me away most.  This is because we were in the country, on hard, dry, ground.  This crack showed the huge violence.  The entire intersection and concrete gutters were covered in cracks like this.  The much more dramatic cracks in the city were created by broken pipes underground or because of liquefaction.  The violence would’ve been greater here to have created this crack on hard, dry, ground.

 

For the most part this building was fine – except for this corner and window.

Street after street in Christchurch was lined with beautiful spring flowers.

A common sight – piles of bricks stacked on the sides of streets from collapsed chimneys.

Another collapsed chimney.