BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – “Experience an earthquake” was not on the list of things Joe Daniels ’13 was looking forward to when he planned to spend spring semester of his sophomore year in Christchurch, New Zealand.
But as many members of the Illinois Wesleyan community know, studying abroad can be full of surprises.
“It was going to be a whole different experience,” said the Brookfield, Ill. native, who arrived in Christchurch on February 10 to study through the Institute for the International Education of Students (IES) at the University of Canterbury. “The earthquake pretty much changed everything for me.”
On February 22 at 12:51 p.m., Daniels was packing up after class in a second-floor lecture hall in the University’s forestry building. “The room just started to shake all of a sudden,” he said. “It started as a little shudder, then quickly escalated into something that moved the room what seemed meters side to side and up and down, all pretty violently. It was honestly probably one of the strangest things I’ve ever felt—like one of those 3-D movie rides where the seats move with the movie, mixed with bad airplane turbulence.”
Daniels was experiencing a 6.3-magnitude earthquake centered only 9 kilometers from the city, which between destructive aftershocks and the damage caused by the quake itself killed nearly 200 people, according to stuff.co.nz. “I can’t recall how it sounded,” said Daniels, noting the city center is still cordoned off nearly six months later. “But a friend in the same room said you could hear the building groan with the shaking.”