Maybe this has been blown out of proportion, we thought briefly when we arrived in Christchurch on Sunday afternoon.
Then we stumbled on to Seabreeze Close, Bexley.
Before us was a street of near-new houses, swamped in silt, their owners standing around looking dazed and confused after the 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit Canterbury at 4.35am on Saturday.
It was tremendously sad.
These were people's dream homes. They seemed like places people had poured a lot of heart and money into - places where people had planned to spend the rest of their lives.
Now those dreams and plans had all been wiped out in two minutes of shaking.
Aptly, the flag on the lawn of one house in the street had been lowered to half-mast.
It was hard to comprehend. Just around the corner, streets appeared almost untouched.
In fact, driving into the city from the south we could see no obvious damage until about halfway along Moorhouse Ave, where the front of an old brick building had crumbled on to the footpath and streets leading to the inner city were cordoned off.
We never made it inside those cordons but we had seen the damage on television and we were able to see the same levels of destruction all over the city.
Of course, large swathes of the urban area and surrounding countryside were not "quake-ravaged", and the majority of people did not have property damaged, but everyone was still affected.
Everyone knew somebody who had lost a home, a job or property. Businesses might be open, but how many of their staff were not at work? More buildings were being cordoned off after every big aftershock.
And how many owners of those apparently undamaged houses would discover in the days and months to come that the home they thought had escaped damage had a problem?
The impact of the quake was like Christchurch itself - sprawling. While the damage was not always evident, the number of people needing help was.
As they took down one chimney, for example, a Dunedin fire crew helping out in Christchurch was asked by a nervous home owner if they could take down the neighbour's cracked chimney. And then someone from the next house wanted theirs taken down.
As the crew tried to leave, another person flagged them down. We found out the next day it was a solid 24 hours before the crew got their next break.
People approached building inspectors, desperately worried they were not going to make it to their home that day and that they would have to spend a fourth night not knowing if their house was safe to enter.
Fire crews called to one building in which new cracks appeared during an aftershock ended up also being taken to five other buildings nearby which needed to be roped off.
The disaster seemed to bring out the best in people. Without fail, they were getting on with cleaning up and moving out - with surprising cheer, given the circumstances.
No-one was dead, what else was there to do? they asked.
Everyone was full of praise for their neighbours, whom they were getting to know, many for the first time. New friendships were being formed on every affected street.
Strangers handed out muffins and cups of tea to people shovelling silt and moving boxes. Others drove around dropping off bread and milk to people without water and power.
Within minutes of a call for blankets for welfare centres, dozens of people arrived with duvets.
Many other random acts of kindness will never be recorded.
To a man - and woman - every person we approached was willing to talk about their experience and show you the damage to their property. Perhaps they just needed to tell anyone who would listen.
They also said they were unprepared for this sort of event.
Many said they had no containers suitable for collecting water. Some did not even have a bucket.
They were also getting frustrated at not knowing what they should do next about their damaged business or home.
By Wednesday, tiredness and emotional fatigue was taking its toll.
Aftershocks - no less scary because they were expected - had kept people from sleeping for days, every rumble made people jump, and anxiety and questions about how long this would go on were common.
Even at the emergency operations centre at the Christchurch Public Art Gallery, aftershocks still had the power to silence the room, bringing tears to the eyes of some people.
The aftershocks also turned the operation into a logistical nightmare. Building inspectors were forced to spend whole days reassessing buildings they had spent the previous day assessing, when there were hundreds of other buildings waiting to be inspected.
Things that would take minutes in a normally functioning city took hours. Traffic was jammed, roads were blocked, traffic lights were out. Cellphone and internet coverage dropped in and out. Some petrol stations were closed.
But life goes on.
The days were sunny and warm and people strolled through parks hand-in-hand while a kilometre to the east people were shovelling silt out of their bedrooms.
At our central city hotel, groups of middle-aged male engineers ate venison, drank Central Otago pinot noir and discussed the best schools for their sons, while outside army trucks whizzed through deserted streets.
The day of the 5.1 aftershock, which struck at 7.50am, a little girl arrived at breakfast clutching a toy rabbit. Her family had flown in from Sydney the night before for a holiday, but this morning they were arranging to fly straight back out.
Indeed, by Wednesday there was some guilty relief to be able to escape the intensity of Christchurch.
And we weren't alone.
We joined a queue of vehicles packed to the back windows with possessions - all heading out of the city.
On the journey home, we gave each big old brick building we saw a quick assessment of what parts would fall down in a 7.1 quake.
Back in Dunedin, the free-flowing traffic and lack of sirens seemed odd at first, and the deep rumble of a passing truck still makes the chest tighten in panic.
It could have been worse for the residents of Christchurch, but try telling the residents of Seabreeze Close to celebrate.
