Yes, there is widespread damage... very severe in places, whole hillsides have detached and crumbled, one damming a river before it then let go causing even more flooding problems. State Highway 1 is destroyed in places, as is the rail network. The location of the epicentre, and its remoteness has been the saving grace of ZL land. Thoughts go out to everyone in the damage zone. 73 de Adrian. ZL1GBG
Was there really any official use of 14,300? I can't imagine why they would use 20m considering that they'd want to talk to places like Wellington and Christchurch. 20m is pretty much useless within NZ. Many years ago when I was newly licensed in ZL and participated in "AREC field day", most of the traffic was on 80m with the "long haul" relay traffic on 40m. I think the main calling channel was 3900 USB. I don't know if ham radio was involved in this event. It certainly would have been useful early on because there were communication problems to the worst affected areas but phone and cellular systems were restored pretty quickly.
Tsunami center (Tsunami.com) reporting there was minimal to no tsunami thankfully. Of course local reports are needed to confirm this.
While initial warnings were for 3-4 m local reports have been all in the 0-2m range with no property damages as yet, this does not include the sparsely populated Chatham Islands about 400 miles off the East Coast where no reporting appears on line. Carl
It can be tough keeping 14.300 clear in an emergency under normal conditions. Hopefully an earthquake and Tsunami never coincide with a contest weekend.
14.300 MHz was not used in this event. I don't know where that idea came from. I suspect that a ZL checked in to the marine net and that somehow morphed into "14.300 is being used for the earthquake". Trying to use 20m within NZ makes no sense at all. Here's NZART's latest newsletter. http://www.nzart.org.nz/assets/infoline/2016/NZART-HQ-Infoline-Issue-347.pdf There was no official amateur radio involvement. Help was offered by AREC (NZ equivalent to ARES) but not required because normal communications were operating or restored quickly. There was some good work by some individual operators. It was all on a VHF repeater.