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Re: [OM] (OM) OT Canterbury earthquake info

Subject: Re: [OM] (OM) OT Canterbury earthquake info
From: Chuck Norcutt <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:25:20 -0500
Good to hear from you again.  Let's hope that your greatest loss lately 
is a battery and alternator.

Chuck Norcutt


On 2/24/2011 8:32 AM, Brian Swale wrote:
> 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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