Dorothy Hollay recalls waking up on the 3rd February 1931 to another beautiful sunny day in Napier, unaware that the day would go down in history as one of New Zealand's greatest disasters ... a massive earthquake that would change the lives and landscape, forever.

At a time when the entire country was on its knees in the financial trough of 1930s depression, 19-year-old Dorothy felt lucky to have her own transport as she parked her bicycle at the bottom of Carlyle Street and walked the steep climb up to the Napier Hospital laundry where she worked.

At 10.45am the town below was humming with business. The kids were back at school, mothers everywhere were bottling the season’s fruit and it was business as usual up at the hospital. Operating theatres were full, patients were resting, laundry staff kept the linen rolling and the night nurses were fast asleep.

One minute later, the earth moved with such a powerful jolt that buildings toppled, bridges collapsed, railway tracks twisted and gaping great holes in the road swallowed up vehicles and city trams. Many believed the end of the world had finally arrived.

“I remember running for the door in the laundry and falling down in the doorway,� says Dorothy who was injured by falling masonry when the ceiling collapsed.

“When I saw the magnitude of the damage outside, my own injuries went unnoticed for a while. I wandered around very dazed. In the hospital grounds patients were being brought out into the gardens, some being operated on in very makeshift conditions by doctors and attended by nurses who had managed to escape injury from bricks and wooden structures.�

Dorothy was shocked to see the new nurses home, built the previous year, reduced to sheer rubble, killing most of the nurses who had finished their night duty.

“I knew one of these young ladies; it was her very first evening on night duty. It was very sad.�

At some time during the day she stumbled upon her brother, Jim.

“My mother had sent him up to he hospital to find me, and then he helped to evacuate patients in the isolation and maternity wards. He helped pull out a lady named Hazel Wheatley, and her newborn baby. Ironically he later married Hazel’s sister, Vera.�

Dorothy too met her future spouse, Syd Hollay, in the rubble of that day, and they were married four years later.

“Syd had a motorbike and had volunteered to be a dispatch rider for the relief organisers as there was very limited means of communication and no transport available. Roads were impassable, gas was leaking everywhere and electricity wires were damaged."

"We saw many bodies laid out in the Botanical Gardens, life had struck them a dreadful blow. They had been in the wrong place when the earthquake struck."

"Jim and I stayed at the hospital, helping out in whatever way one could but at 5 p.m. it was decided we should go home as our Mother would be getting very distraught … it was six hours since the first mighty tremor and she would be thinking she had maybe lost the two of her children.�

From the bar of her brother’s bike, peddled by Jim through the broken twisted streets, Dorothy was numbed by what she saw.

“Houses everywhere had collapsed, chimneys had fallen, and Jim and I had to get off the bike at one point so that he could drag it across a large deep gap in the road, and we didn’t get home until 6pm, much to our mother’s relief.�

When night came, her family were too afraid to sleep indoors.

“We were still experiencing lots of tremors keeping us all terrified in case another big one was still to follow, and we slept in a tent that was given to us by aid relief. We were aware that many people had been rescued from the rubble, while others were still trapped. 258 people were killed, and quite a few died in the city’s inferno that followed the quake. Unfortunately the fire station had collapsed on top of the fire-engines so there was no way of dousing the burning city.�

The week before the disaster hit, Dorothy had been yachting in the lagoon.

“Looking at it today, all these years later," says 94-year-old Dorothy, "it’s hard to believe the land rose so much that there’s no sea now on which to sail.�

While mother nature took the lives of hundreds with one hand, she gave the gift of land with the other. Within a year a brand new city rose from the ashes to become Napier, the Art Deco capital of the world