Dairy farmers help each other out

Mark Williamson, who manages 950 cows on 330ha, has no power or water, the water heating tanks in his shed have toppled, and the 60-bale rotary platform has jumped off its bearings to sit about 15cm out of place.

“Even if there was power you couldn’t move it,” he says.

Williamson said he was lucky he was able to walk his herd for milking at 3 or 4am about 9km to a neighbour’s shed which was still operable on generator power.

However, without power he couldn’t feed and water them. Although it was “politically incorrect,” he had had no choice but to put them by a creek.

Further along River Road, a small circle of camp chairs stood on a gravel and concrete forecourt of the milking shed of Don and Donalda Galletly’s farm – where the Galletlys, their manager and family, and other farm workers had sat out the aftershocks together in the early hours of this morning.

There was safety and security in numbers, said Donalda Galletly.

“We’ve been looking after the people. That’s the main thing,” she said.

Their shed was also unusable, the rotary platform having jumped off its mountings. The concrete pad was crossed with wide cracks and a nearby feed silo had moved about 15cm.

With milking impossible on the property, manager Mark Galbraith had arranged to move half the herd to a nearby farm, but the other half would stay and would have to be dried off, he said.

Also close to the epicentre was farm forestry worker Chris Costigan, who said he was asleep upstairs in his rented 1894-vintage cottage when the quake hit and was convinced the roof was about to fall on him.

He had no power, no water after his concrete tank toppled from its stand and shattered across the back yard, and was working single-handed this afternoon to try to weatherproof the gaping hole in his living room left by a falling brick chimney.

Costigan said he had been living only 2km from the epicentre of the first of the Canterbury quakes in September 2010, and had been in Cathedral Square, Christchurch, only half an hour before the big fatal quake of February 2011.

“That why I left down there, to get away from them,” he said.