Today was a wonderful and a little scary day.
Today I accompanied Elder and Sister Nance as they teared across the Canterbury countryside with Elder and Sister Nielson as we visited Waimakariri Mayor, Ron Keating, Selwyn District Mayor Kelvin Coe and Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker.
We were visiting them to donate $180,000 between the three Mayoral Emergency funds - they are all now amalgamated in with the Red Cross fund -Elder Nielson gave each mayor their cheque and a 72 hour emergency kit filled with a bunch of things you might need in a civil defence emergency - I didn't but you might.
One of the places we visited with our Stake President, President MacDonald was the Stake Centre on Memorial Ave. We call this the Fendalton Chapel and it got a walloping from the earthquake.
This chapel was built in 1959 by members doing it for themselves. It's a fairly typical chapel painted off white and not big enough but this chapel is special because it's grounds are park like with a broad lawn, a creek wandering between the chapel and the busy road. The car park is out back and the crack starts in the furthest corner with a crack through the grass that is wide enough to fit your fist in and so deep that Sister Nielson was up to her armpit in it and couldn't reach anything.
That is a very deep crack.
The crack races across the car park and had spewed up liquefaction-ified sand across the tarseal. It travels directly underneath the older part of the chapel.
The first damage you see is this....
Then you go inside the rec hall, the crack goes across the basketball court and is through thick concrete lifting the parquet flooring. This floor is more than 30 metres/100feet long and the crack is the entire length of the floor.
And the floor is separated from the walls...
And the wall is cracked too.
Scary thing about this crack is that you can see daylight through it.
Scarier thing is that the engineers have said we can use this chapel... are they freaken mental?
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