Earthquake in Christchurch

There is nothing much I can say about this earthquake in my homeland except be thankful that no-one was killed.   Australians joke about the shaky island, and when I lived in Wellington at the bottom of the North Island we used to discuss how bad an earthquake would be when it finally happened.  The city is built on steep hills and so half the houses would fall down in landslides and there are only a couple of exit roads to the north and they would be easily blocked.

Christchurch is flat, but it still looks terribly damaged.  It’s a pleasant, agreeable city, with views of the Southern Alps, beaches with good swimming and some handsome colonial architecture.  In the 1930s and 40s it gave Karl Popper shelter.  In the 1954 two schoolgirls murdered the mother of one of them which made world news and was astonishingly anomalous in a peaceful and sedate city .  Peter Jackson’s based his excellent film Heavenly Creatures on that event.

A country that has a good infrastructure, a government that is not corrupt and a people who pride themselves on their practical skills and self-reliance can recover from this kind of thing better than most, I suppose, and hope. 

Update

A New Zealand builder friend sent me this:-

The building code requirements for earthquake are stronger in North Island zones, but NZ building style generally good for earthquakes. Most of what fell over looks like British type of construction, unreinforced masonry.

Further update:-

According to this scientist, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about when it comes to earthquakes:-

GNS senior scientist Dr Hamish Campbell told NZPA an earthquake disaster was inevitable in Christchurch.

"My colleagues and I have been saying for a long time that Christchurch, by virtue of the nature of the ground and its proximity to the Alpine fault, is inevitably going to be brought to its knees at some stage," Dr Campbell said.

He believed there would be a lot more awareness now, and lessons would be learnt.

"One brick house may have suffered no damage at all, and yet the one next to it suffered a lot of damage and I suspect that's all to do with the nature of the top metre of ground beneath the house.

"The extent to which seismic energy gets amplified is all about how strong the material is immediately beneath the house.

"For instance, a house might be built on an old river channel and the one next to it isn't. So that can make the difference," he said.

Christchurch was built on a plain comprising gravels, silts and peats, so it was "very unconsolidated". It was also low-lying but had a high water table.

"If you compare that with Wellington, everybody there is living on solid rock. It's a very different situation," Dr Campbell said.

The focus for rebuilding should be on the nature of the ground and the foundations, rather than the building materials, he said.