New Zealand Earthquake - Any Members Affected ?

[poynton]

Any members affected by the recent earthquake?

Second one to happen in six months in the same area.


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[aardvarkash10]

you betcha! I'm camping in my company's offices at the airport having come ot CHC for hte day to do interviews. The city is buggered to put it politely, and I'm stuck here. To make matters worse, its now raining and flooding is a serious issue along with thousands of displaced residents. I can't wait ot get out. Auckland never looked sooooo good.

[Luke]

I was working on comms for a board meeting that's been cancelled. Fortunately I'm not there. I was in a meeting on the Wellington waterfront and felt it. Thats around 300Kms away. This one was nasty.

[djQUAN]

It's getting more often these days. We just had one this morning around 8 hours ago epicenter ~41miles from my area (USGS says). didn't feel it though as I must have been busy with work.... or I was sleepy.

[DigitalJunkie]

Also,for anyone in the Pacific Northwest,Mount St.Helens apparently had some 'indigestion' too.

[amc184]

It's been an interesting day.

Not to much damage, the roof shed a dozen tiles and six courses of bricks came off my fireplace, but my house is largely intact. The power is back on, and I have the internet (obviously), but restoration of water and drainage looks to be some time off.

I was outdoors for the second largest shock of the day and saw a two story building collapse and a car pancaked to less than a foot thick, but no one was in them at the time. Despite being smaller in magnitude, the depth, location and weakening from previous shock made this shock far more destructive than the one in September.

One of my B&Ws worked its way off its stand and put a couple of chips in its veneer, but the drivers look okay. Apart from that, my audio gear survived without damage. A friend lost a Pro-Ject RPM 9.2, he wasn't that happy about that. However, overshadowing all of that is that none of my friends or family were injured or killed.

It's going to be a long night, there's a significant shake every 10 to 20 minutes here ....

[DBMandrake]

As a New Zealander living in Scotland I've watched the drama unfold from the other side of the world via TV news and the Internet with horror and disbelief.

The current quake is bad enough by itself but for it to follow so closely after another fairly bad one in September seems so unusual.

Although I don't know anyone in Christchurch and have never lived there (hailing from the North Island, having lived most recently in Whangarei) my heart goes out to those of you affected, directly or indirectly. I have visited Christchurch once many years ago and liked it very much.

At least Christchurch's plight is being noticed in other parts of the world, it's been the top news story every hour all day long on BBC news today, pushing the "Libya unrest" story into second place. (Not to demean that though, as it's also a serious situation)

One thing is sure though, the climate and geology of the world seems to be becoming more and more "violent" and unpredictable in the last decade, it does make you wonder what is going on...

[Pano]

Crazy damage. Glad no one here was hurt. My sympathy to all the victims.

From the look of the damage, NZ (or south island) must not have very strict earthquake building codes. Is that so?

[amc184]

Actually, the whole of New Zealand has very strict building codes, but many of the buildings that collapsed were very old, built long before the codes were in force. Some older buildings were retrofitted to meet code, but I believe smaller buildings weren't required to comply, and it was a lot of these that collapsed.

[VivaVee]

Originally Posted by Pano

Crazy damage. Glad no one here was hurt. My sympathy to all the victims.

From the look of the damage, NZ (or south island) must not have very strict earthquake building codes. Is that so?

Nope. We have some of the toughest building codes in the world. But Christchurch was settled first so it has the highest percentage of old buildings. Remember there was a 7.1 quake in September last year so what didn't break last time got another chance to fall down...