At 4:30am on Saturday morning Christchurch, New Zealand was hit by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake. This is the location of our New Zealand office. Amazingly no one in the city was killed and there were very few injuries, despite there being widespread damage. Our staff are all well and, with one exception, have escaped major damage to their houses.

Our core services were uninterrupted by the earthquake. We did experience approximately a 10 hour outage of our email and our merchandising console. I apologize for that and we are working to build more redundancy into these systems.

Our office is on the 10th and 11th floors in a building in down town Christchurch. We had staff in the building at the time and they had a terrifying experience. Luckily they escaped unscathed. The office was a mess with bookcases toppling over and everything being thrown around. However our building is sound and  there was very little damage, so we were able to quickly return things to normal.  Our staff have been working from home but we expect them to be back in the office in the next day or two.

Approximately 60% of houses in Christchurch have been damaged and many buildings in the city will need to be demolished. We are lucky that as a company we have escaped relatively unscathed. The team is still in shock at what has happened – made worse by the continuing aftershocks. I expect it will take us a while for us to return to normal.  Thank you for your understanding as we work through this.

Here are a few pictures:

This is typical of what our offices looked like after the quake. Although, to be fair, this guy was always pretty messy.
This is typical of what our offices looked like after the quake. Although, to be fair, this guy was always pretty messy.
road
This is the road outside of the house of one of our team.

Shaun's house
This is the roof of my house after the quake. One Chimney fell down during the quake and the other one had to come down soon after. This is common across the city.

One thought to “Earthquake in Christchurch”

  • Andreja Milenkovic

    Hi Shaun,

    I am glad that everyone at SLI Systems is OK and I hope that aftershocks will stop very soon.

    Best regards,
    Andreja

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