However, central North Island residents spoken to by the Herald on Sunday were stoic. Raetihi woman Wiki Brown said she felt a little tremor and "that was it".
"The 7.0 was out of it. The whole house was shaking, I thought the mountain was blowing up. This quake was tiny."
Another Raetihi resident, Creedence McNaught, described the quake as "just a little shake".
Several residents spoken to in Turangi said they did not feel the quake.
Pura Smith was alerted to the drama by a friend who felt the earthquake 100km away in Napier.
"I never felt a thing. Turangi's still standing."
Bland said she was not surprised the quake felt stronger to those further away from the epicentre.
That was because the tectonic plate was dipping under the North Island, so energy from it travelled back up the plate following the easiest path available, which was to the east.
"On our maps [of earthquakes felt], there is a big empty space around Turangi. Sometimes it actually feels weaker to those closer to it."
Even though the two quakes this week occurred on the same plate, that was the only similarity. "The distances are too great for one to have affected the strains of the other."
Neither had caused major damage because of their depth.
"That's the problem in Christchurch - it has the misfortune that its earthquakes have been very shallow, so almost all the energy comes up to the surface."
The Canterbury earthquake sequence began with a magnitude 7.1 tremor, centred 10km deep and 40km west of Christchurch, but it was a 5km deep, 6.3 magnitude aftershock that struck 5km from the city months later that caused the bulk of the damage and the mass casualties.
Yesterday's quake did not mean future shakes were any more or less likely than before, Bland said.
"It's just another day, another earthquake. It's just New Zealand."
