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Chaos reigned when Margaret Elliot pulled up at her house soon after it was destroyed by the Edgecumbe earthquake.
"I couldn't get in the gate," she said. "The concrete had come up in a V shape."
Beyond, the wooden house lay in a heap. It had been knocked off its piles, the steps and verandahs torn away, and the chimney had collapsed.
"It was devastating to see your house like that," Mrs Elliot said this week on the 20th anniversary of the magnitude 6.3 quake, which struck at 1.43pm on Monday, March 2, 1987, causing millions of dollars of damage in towns across the Eastern Bay of Plenty.
Miraculously, no one was killed.
The worst damage was in Edgecumbe, but Mrs Elliot had been at her daughter's house in Matata when the quake struck.
"The windows were bulging and things were falling everywhere. The cars on the lawn were swaying so bad I thought they were going to tip over."
Soon after, her son-in-law in Edgecumbe called. "He told me not to bother coming home. I had no house to come home to."
But Mrs Elliot went anyway, needing to see for herself. The only way she could get in was by clambering through a hole left when the chimney came down, and she found her fireplace had been flung across the lounge, on to her couch.
"If I'd have been home I would have been sitting on the couch watching cricket," she said.
She salvaged a few possessions - others were later looted - and spent the next 13 months living in a house provided free of charge by the local dairy factory while her new house was built. The new house, where she still lives, has a small stained-glass window that survived the quake and serves as a reminder of her old house and the husband she lost in 1984.
"I wanted to have something of the house I was brought to as a bride," she said.
Mrs Elliot's house was one of many that tumbled from their foundations or lost roofs in Edgecumbe.
The dairy factory was also devastated, which resulted in the largest of 6000 insurance claims made after the disaster.
The claim was for $144 million.
Today, a twisted metal girder from the remains stands outside the rebuilt factory, a monument to "the forces of nature and the determination of the local population to endure and prosper".
John de la Rue, chief fire officer at Edgecumbe and an employee at the dairy plant, said cleaning up the factory before damage could be fully assessed was a huge task.
Fire crews worked non-stop for two weeks, carting water from Awakeri hot springs to pump into pipes full of rotting milk.
The disaster resulted in the biggest mobilisation of fire brigades in the country's history, with crews coming from as far away as Auckland and Palmerston North.
The Army also set up a base at Edgecumbe, and it and other Government agencies and community organisations co-ordinated a vast relief effort for those without food, water, shelter, power and sewerage in Kawerau, Te Teko and Whakatane.
Mr de la Rue was working on the dairy factory floor when the earthquake struck and said the experience was terrifying.
"We'd been having a swarm of earthquakes up until that day. Everyone was on edge."
Seven minutes before the big one struck, a large quake rocked the factory and sent people scurrying.
As steam at the plant was turned off, the main quake hit.
"Everyone ran outside, which is not really what you'd been told to do but that appeared to be the safest thing because it was larger than anyone had felt before," Mr de la Rue said.
He ran out as milk silos toppled around him and made his way to a wall 10m away, on the banks of the Rangitaiki River.
"There was so much shaking, you were just really holding on, but the whole river started sloshing. At one stage the river just emptied over the top of us. I can remember looking up to the bridge and seeing the water from the river go over the top of the bridge, about 20m above the river."
As the workers clung to the wall, the ground along it began opening up.
"People couldn't stand up. There was a steam line blew up behind us. That was a horrendous noise," Mr de la Rue said.
At Kawerau's Tasman Pulp and Paper Mill a 30m chimney toppled, and cracks appeared in the Matahina dam, sparking fears it would burst.
"It would have wiped us out," one resident said.
Whakatane Hospital was also damaged and patients were evacuated, but the worst injuries suffered anywhere were, unbelievably, chest trauma and broken bones.
In Te Teko, a woman had her leg crushed when she was thrown into the cattle yards and a bull - also pushed over by the force - landed on her.
But while humans escaped severe physical injury, the land was left scarred, a faultline several kilometres long opening up in Edgecumbe farmland. The faultline ripped through farmer Bill McCracken's land, splitting his cowshed and causing paddocks to drop more than a metre in places.
At the time, Mr McCracken and his wife saw only a line of dust.
Railway lines warped by the force formed an enduring image of the quake.
Students at Edgecumbe College were forced out of the school pool when it cracked.
Since then, the Eastern Bay of Plenty has endured three natural disasters - floods in 1999 and 2004, and the floods and landslides of 2005 that laid waste to Matata.
The McCrackens' house lost its roof in the earthquake and was flooded with a metre of water in 2004 but, like others in the area, they say they would never leave after seeing the community rally after each disaster.
Earthquakes continue to rock Edgecumbe and several have been recorded - but not felt - in recent weeks.
Some in the town are used to them but Bill McCracken's wife, Glenys, says she will never feel that way.
"I just tend to freeze," she says. "I honestly hate them."
