It is now nearly a week after the quake hit The New Zealand city of Christchurch has begun to bury its dead following last week’s devastating earthquake.
The first service was for the youngest victim so far – Baxtor Gowland was born just after last September’s quake.
The death toll from 22 February is now 148 people; only eight bodies have been released for burial so far.
Rescue teams continue to search for survivors but aftershocks have hampered their efforts and a forecast windstorm could add to the hazards they face.
No survivors have been rescued since mid-afternoon on Wednesday.
The opening of new cracks in a cliff overlooking some outer suburbs and continuing after-shocks have kept residents nervous.
People are still trying to leave the city following the magnitude 6.3 earthquake that wrecked the centre of the city.
Young Baxter Gowland was one of two infants named as casualties in the quake; at a chapel attended by family and friends, his short life was shown in a slideshow to a sound track of the Sarah MacLachlan song “Angel”.
It is the first of several services to come, as many scores of people remain missing.
Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said the country had “suffered a tragedy of monumental proportions”.
“The building damage I’ve seen compared with Haiti,” she told Radio New Zealand, in a reference to the massive quake that killed at least 220,000 there in January last year.
“It’s going to require every ounce of recovery in this country to push through from this,” she added, after a visit to Christchurch on Sunday.
Earthquake victims were remembered at churches in Christchurch and across New Zealand on Sunday For New Zealand Police Association president Greg O’Connor, the emotion and collapse was similar to that in parts of Britain that had been bombed during World War II.
“This is our, probably our equivalent of the Blitz in New Zealand,” he told Australia’s ABC.
Prime Minister John Key is presenting an initial plan for covering the cost of necessary reconstruction to parliament in Wellington.
He said there was still a glimmer of hope survivors could be found.
But rescuers working for a sixth day are only finding bodies and engineers say at least a third of the buildings in the centre of Christchurch will need to be demolished.
Hundreds of damaged suburban homes may also have to be pulled down.
Mr Key said the disaster “may be New Zealand’s single most tragic event”, outstripping a 1931 quake in Napier which killed 256.
For many residents, it is all too much, and there is an exodus from Christchurch, says the BBC’s Phil Mercer in the city.
Officials believe up to 22 bodies may lie beneath the rubble of Christchurch Cathedral; as many as 120 are thought to have been killed inside the collapsed CTV office block, including Japanese, Chinese and Philippine nationals; many others are presumed dead inside the destroyed Pyne Gould Guinness building.
Power has been restored to most of the city but water supply remains a problem, with residents being urged to boil water for drinking or cooking due to contamination fears.
The quake struck at a shallow depth of 5km (3.1 miles) last Tuesday lunchtime, when the South Island city was at its busiest.
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Streets in the north-eastern suburb of Bexley were flooded as the quake caused water mains to burst, which coincided with heavy rain.
The multi-storey Pyne Gould Guinness Building, which normally houses around 200 workers, collapsed. A number of people were thought to be trapped inside.
The 63m spire of the city’s Anglican cathedral was toppled by the earthquake. A New Zealand TV reporter took a look inside the damaged building.
Part of Christchurch’s Canterbury Television [CTV] building completely collapsed in the earthquake. Some 24 people have been rescued from the building, but police said there might be between 60 and 120 bodies trapped underneath.
In the aftermath of the earthquake, Rhys Taylor took this video on Oxford Terrace, 50 metres away from the city’s main hospital. He said: “Cars were being used as ambulances to transport the injured.”
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