Lambton Quay, the main st of New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, lies directly above a tectonic plate intersection.
Hold tight - we’re checking permissions before loading more content
It suffers more than 750 minor earthquakes and tremors in the course of an average year.
These can often cause top floors of hotels on the street to sway up to two metres from side to side.
Not being on an intersection of tectonic plates, Benalla is rarely troubled by earthquakes.
A tremor or earthquake is only possible when stresses within the Indo-Australia plate on which it stands are internally adjusted.
However, just before 5 pm on Sunday, March 17, 1946, Benalla received its worst earthquake in recorded history.
The tremor was also felt in Baddaginnie.
All of Benalla was shaken, but the greatest damage was on a narrow strip of land on the north side of the railway line.
After the quake, the walls of a newly completed brick home in Gillies St were left leaning crazily.
The house was so badly damaged that it had to be rebuilt.
A railway house occupied by the O’Connell family also suffered serious damage.
It was condemned as unsafe.
Nearly all chimney tops in Magennis St were shaken askew and required repair or re-building.
The licensed grocery of Mr Vin Hayes suffered badly.
Bottles of wine, tomato sauce and honey jars that had been stacked on shelves fell to the floor during the tremor and broke.
They left a sticky marinade spread across the shop’s floor.
This was still a time when pharmacies often made up their own medications and tonics.
Three local chemists arrived to find that some of their dispensing bottles lying shattered on the floor of their pharmacies.
The grocery stock in Moran and Cato’s store suffered a similar fate.
In Benalla’s business district, many shop windows shattered onto footpaths.
They had been decorated for the weekend’s trading.
Piles of glass mixed with decorations were strewn everywhere.
The Victoria Hotel suffered considerable damage, too.
Much of its bottle stock was broken.
Worse, perhaps, the hotel itself suffered large cracks in many of its rooms.
These started and gaped as the tremor struck.
Cracks also opened up in schoolrooms at the high school.
There were damaged walls and cracks at the arts and crafts school.
Even the bitumen of several roads in town cracked and yawned.
Elsewhere in Benalla, many buildings suffered fallen plaster, broken mirrors and broken bottles of stored jam and preserves.
In all, there was more than $4000 damage done just to dwellings.
It is not known what rating on the Richter Scale the tremor had.
According to the United States Geological Survey, the damage in Benalla was consonant with that caused by an earthquake of around 4.9 to five magnitude.
Locals believed that the tremor propagated along a corridor from Goomalibee.
Interestingly, the main area of damage occurred in the same area as had been damaged not long before by a supercell mini-tornado.
Aftershocks and minor tremors continued to occur up until the following Wednesday.
- John Barry, Coo-ee