The day the earth shook

For people in Canterbury, the impact of Saturday's big earthquake will resonate for years.

They were dragged from their sleep at 4.36am, confused and terrified, as the earthquake tore the ground apart, buckling roads, remaking the landscape and wrecking homes and shops.

Yet as the day dawned Canterbury residents could barely believe they had got through the country's most damaging earthquake since the 1931 Napier disaster with so little loss of life.

The 7.1 magnitude quake, centred  40km west of Christchurch, shut down the central city and caused up to $2 billion in property damage, but the human toll appears to be just one death - a heart attack during the quake - and the serious injury of two men hit by window glass and chimney bricks.

By late morning there was an period of panic that at times threatened to turn ugly.

Supermarkets sold out of water amid scenes one witness described as ''like something from a UN aid mission in Africa''. Patches of central Christchurch were gridlocked as residents rushed to fill up with petrol before the pumps ran dry. They didn't.

Then the panic passed. Those who had been utterly terrified during that endless shaking were left under a glorious spring sun looking at a CBD that resembled a war zone.

The petrol-pump gridlock was replaced by a surge of rubber-neckers heading for the Christchurch inner city.

Scratchy-eyed from the early start but twitchy with adrenaline, the city took on a carnival atmosphere as strangers compared notes, and teenagers with cellphones chattered and took photos amid the rubble.

Vodafone boss Paul Brislen eventually asked TVNZ to stop asking for people to send in images and video clips because there were concerns the stressed cellphone network might choke under the strain.

One wedding party, unable to dine at a wrecked restaurant, relocated to McDonalds, and the photographer shot the newly-weds against the rubble.

Throughout the day media arrived to collect stories of survival, but also of strangeness like the Victoria St clock-tower frozen at 24 minutes to five, the  swimming pool that popped from its hole, the sandy mud that bubbled from the ground, and the tragedy of Gidro the lemur, who drowned at Orana Wildlife Park.

And all those shattered brick chimneys, scattered across the roofs of timber-framed homes that flexed with the quake and survived.

The damage is severe, yet haphazard. Head out from the city centre and you can drive for kilometres without seeing anything unusual, then suddenly there's a stretch of torn tarmac and ruined shop frontages.

Yesterday there was an astonishing atmosphere of resilience and even relief, as a community rallied and shared its bottled water with neighbours. Early reports of looting in the dawn hours were later discounted by police, who said there had been nothing more than ''minor'' disorder.

Sunday Star-Times reporter Lois Cairns said even those who had lost almost everything were remarkably upbeat as they faced the heartbreaking task of sifting through broken possessions or saying goodbye to the wreckage of the family home.

But the fear isn't quite over yet.

As blogger Samuel Williams put it, the angst didn't end with the big shake; the aftershocks kept coming all day, some of them very strong  and others ''like groans deep from the earth, barely perceptible rumbles on the edge of your hearing''.

One of the largest, with a magnitude of 5.4, struck just before 5pm last night. Cantabrians will be hyper-alert for more, though the risk of large shocks falls away sharply after 48 hours.