Hi all,
I, and all of my close family, are safe.
My former home seems to have been damaged this time but I have not
seen it or photos.
I'm actually in Clyde, 500 km away.
The day before the 12.55 noon earthquake, I was in Christchurch at a
funeral; at 2pm I started my trip south in the heavily loaded Range-Rover.
Incidentally - this vehicle is legendary for extravagant repair costs - and
this
month added to them. I can't blame Landrover for this one though. I had
been having trouble with low charging rate. On the previous trip to
Christchurch I got there, and after calling in at my brother's place, the RR
wouldn't start. Not enough battery charge. Jump start using his Subaru
Forester got me to Sumner, where I had the calcium ion battery charged for
2 1/4 days. I thought this charge would be enough to sustain the RR for the
whole trip south. Wrong. At 4.10 pm half way through the 500km trip, I
called in at a place called Fairlie to top up the diesel, then RR wouldn't
start
to get out of the service station. I ended up buying a new lead-acid battery
at considerable cost. This got me home. Just.
I now know that the electronics of the RR uses a stupendous amount of
electricity - for a diesel, or even my little petrol Starlet. Running a
computer,
gear-changes, monitoring and actioning ride height and levelling, and
goodness knows what else (I deliberately did not run cabin fan, climate
control, CD player, or lights), 3 1/2 hours empty a full large battery. Now I
have two of them (won't go to waste).
I ended up paying for a new alternator (French, Valeo, the exact
replacement, which I was lucky they could find in the country) which works a
treat. Seems also to have improved gear changes. And produces the 14+
volts needed to charge the calcium-ion battery very well.
At NZ $918 this has played havoc with my budgeting for a couple of months!
Can't complain; the original alternator has run for close to 300,000 km.
The 4th September earthquake awoke a fault that was either new, or at
least 16,000 years old. This was not a neat tidy single slip-plane that moved,
but as I understand it, a sloping zone of fracture. In the FOUR months that
followed until now, there have been well over 1,000 aftershocks, some of
them major.
This fault is associated with a structure that extends to the south Island of
NZ all the way from the Chatham Islands to the east, apparently.
The initial set of shocks were west of Christchurch by about ?40 km and the
fault line ran about NE in direction.
The aftershocks ran more or less parallel to this or were splintered off it, as
the stresses were relieved then passed on to new zones.
The Tuesday shock this week was located 5 km deep, about 5 - 10 km to
the SW of city centre, and probably ran NE from there. I have seen one
image of the city from the high Port Hills just seconds after the shock. Photo
taken about 6 km to the SE. It shows a long zone extending NE from the city
centre with dense spurts of dust rising maybe 30 metres up from the streets.
The 6.4 shock has been followed by its own set of aftershocks, many at
strength 4 and 5. These can be expected to continue for many days, and
come in addition to swarms of shocks originating from the set that started in
September.
This is normal seismic activity as the earth evolves, and would go un-noticed
and with little to show for it or bother us, except that there happen to be a
lot
of humans living above it with all their material artifacts in the form of
buildings, roads etc.
The liquefaction in low-lying areas is a lot worse than in September, and
vents that opened then have been active even more than before.
Christchurch is built on an area which has layers of dense gravel alluvium,
sea-sand, peat and forest swamp, and so on. These link to the Waimakariri
River, and give us drinking water of exceptionally fine quality and quantity
(filtered by unseen little organisms that were unknown until a few years ago),
but the downside is that at times it is like living on top of jelly.
I think we will in future have a new set of building codes.
At the moment the confirmed dead are 98, and 226 are listed as missing.
We have expert urban search and rescue teams from many countries here
as well as our own; 600 of them at last count.
The greatest (bad) surprise was the structural collapse of two relatively new
buildings with many people inside. The CTV (Christchurch TV) building
(commented on by AG) had an English language School with a new class of
Japanese and Chinese students, on one floor, a Nursing School on another
floor, and the TV people. While a few have been extracted alive, there could
be 120 bodies in there. Not only did it collapse on itself, but a fire started
which probably asphyxiated the people. They are expected to be dead BUT
one surviving Japanese student said (S)he had a text yesterday morning
from inside. A Japanese expert team have arrived and they are working
solely on extracting their own people.
The other surprise was the ?? Pyne Gould building on Cambridge Terrace
which had been specially strengthened not many years ago. Collapsed like a
deck of cards. Shocking. Many office workers inside, some rescued.
That's about it. I rarely watch TV, but today (yesterday now) I spent a few
hours watching live coverage.
The flat sea-bay land of Sumner where my residual gear is, in general
suffered little new damage apart from some spectacular exceptions such as
a large slab of cliff rock falling on the RSA (Returned Services Association)
rooms, killing 3 people, and some other house similarly crushed by falling
rocks. There are likely to be more such associated with the failure of
landforms around cliffs.
Shag Rock
(http://www.tope.nl/tope_show_entry.php?event=15&pic=34&header_font_to
_use=arial)
is now apparently half its height. Wish I had photographed it more.
Brian Swale.
--
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