On This Day: New Zealand's worst earthquake kills 256 people in Hawke's Bay

February 3: New Zealand’s deadliest earthquake killed at least 256 people after levelling the cities of Napier and Hastings on this day in 1931.

The Magnitude 7.8 quake, which last two and a half minutes, also caused devastating fires after rupturing gas pipes in the North Island’s Hawke’s Bay region.

The blazes were quickly brought under control in Hastings, where 93 people died, including 19 crushed to death when a department store collapsed.

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But in Napier the job of extinguishing the inferno was made harder by cracked water pipes and a reservoir that drained after the tremor caused its bottom to rise 21ft.

There, 161 people were killed – with dozens trapped in burning buildings – while the North Bridge collapsed and cut the city off from outside assistance.

Ray Copland, who was then 11 years old and that day had started at Napier Boys’ High School, recalled the horror.

“When I came to, I was lying in the playground,” he told Te Ara: The Encyclopdia of New Zealand.
“Blood poured from above my right ear, my vision was distorted and my ear was deaf.

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“Then I felt a sharp pain in my right hand: my pen was dangling from its nib, which was buried in my palm. I pulled the pen and brought the nib out with it.

“I turned and saw that the assembly hall, where lately hundreds of boys and a dozen masters had been singing, was now a hillock of bricks, completely destroyed.

“I realised that there must have been a colossal earthquake, and that everybody had fled homeward. I was never to discover how I ended up in the playground.”

As he walked home down streets “buried in glass and rubble, every building broken”, Copland saw the ruins of the Technical College where his friend Lloyd Rhodes died.

“Ribs of timber and brick thrust up through the wreckage,” he added.

“Smoke was beginning to seep through the ruins, and I could see sharp tongues of flame, fed by a brisk wind from the sea.

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“All this time the earth would suddenly shudder, threatening to throw me off my feet. My dead right ear seemed to unbalance me.”

A British Pathé newsreel from 1964 showed the city’s astonishing Art Deco transformation and the devastation wrought in 1931.

Luckily, on the same morning the disaster struck, the Royal Navy ship HMS Veronica also arrived at port of Napier, which was settled by Europeans in the mid 19th century.

It was left aground after the harbour bottom rose, but the 450 sailors on board were unharmed and so were on hand to help.
They used seawater to try and put out fires – a task made difficult by hoses getting clogged by shingle.

They also summoned the cruisers HMS Diomedes and HMS Dunedin, which arrived the next day with food, tents, medicine, blankets, and a team of doctors and nurses.

By this time, the fires had been put out - but much of the handsome city, which had been described as the Nice of the Pacific, lay in ruins.

Hastings, especially the centre, had also been mostly razed to the ground and the nearby town of Wairoa, where two died, was also devastated.

Over the next two weeks there were 525 aftershocks recorded across the earthquake-prone country, which lies on the boundary between two tectonic plates.

The original earthquake, with its epicentre nine miles north of Napier, was triggered when the Pacific Plate moved under the Australian Plate.

It remains the deadliest natural disaster in New Zealand’s history, followed by the Christchurch earthquake of 2011 that killed 185 people.