http://www.crashbang.co.nz/quake040910/index.html

That looks like a lot of work to get things fixed.

Surveyers are going to make some dough.

Holy fuck.  Definition of.

WOW!  I would have shat a few bricks if I saw the land ripping itself apart like that.  I imagine you could see the waves move through the land  if you were out in the open.

While not nearly as bad, that reminded me of one of the last earthquakes in Seattle that I was in.  South Seattle is built on landfill, so when we had a quake years ago (must have been 7 years now), the landfill settled and the back of my company's warehouse litterally fell off the rest of the building.  This was a material handling company and we had pallet rack come down on top of one of our fork lifts, which took hours to excavate.  

The road in front of our building opened up and the widest gap in the street was about a foot.  Down in the international district bricks were falling off the buildings and hitting people.
I guess the good news is that Seattle is fairly strict when it comes to earthquake compliance when building structures...I guess NZ isn't so strict.