Hi Mike
Been following this on the TV, one hell of a mess.
I looked up your profile as soon as I saw the first bit & saw you are in Auckland so not to close to the big bit lets hope there's no more.

Over here its been chaos with 2 cyclones on the west coast & 4 mini tornado's ripping through Karratha yesterday, left a hell of a mess, no-one up there was hurt bad & I spoke with my son last night & again today, our house is OK with no damage so far.
When I rang him @ 1300 our time the current cyclone was directly on him & the phone was a bit wonky so going to ring again later today to see how he went.

The whole of OZ & NZ are topsy turvy lately, stay safe mate.

Cheers
Barry

Mike,
glad you and yours are okay.  Thought about you first thing when I saw the news.

Carolyn

Terrible....been following it on the news.

So glad you are safe.

Mike, been keeping up with the Quake on the news.. I am so glad that you and yours are okay and all the rest of our NZ Family Members.. I will continue to keep you all uplifted in Prayers.

Christy, I'm also Praying for your Aunt & Uncle's safety while their over there...

Peace & Blessings
Lady Luv

Nothing too much to report overnight. There have been multiple people rescued from collapsed buildings but also bodies.

The CBD (city centre) seems to have been hit the worst with many buildings that haven't collapsed being badly damaged. The heart of the second biggest city in NZ has been ripped out.

We're getting help from Australia with specialist search and rescue staff arriving overnight and more today. NZ got offers of help from all over the world including Australia, US, Japan, Israel, Singapore, Europe and many others.

There are plenty of doctors here. There was a medical conference going on with over 400 doctors from all over the world, all are helping out. Similarly there was a conference here in Wellington (400 miles away)(I'm working down here this week) for NZ civil defence staff, so they are being flown back.

All the people with CH I've been in contact with via this forum are in the North Island, so all are likely to be safe, but given that NZ is a small country, only just over 4 million people, virtually everyone will know people affected by this.

thanks for checking in -- we do worry about you guys... ya'll have been having a rough time lately... Stay safe... prayers are with you...

My thoughts and prayers are with everyone affected by the quake! 

The rescue effort is still ongoing with specialist teams arriving from all over the world. At some locations they are still pulling people alive out from the rubble, but elsewhere they are saying that some locations were unsurvivable.

The death toll is currently 75, but they have just been concentrating on getting the living out. There are 300+ people still missing, with this expecting to become NZ's worst ever disaster (257 people died when an Air NZ plane crashed into Mt Erebus in Antarctica). It isn't just people from NZ, with one building containing a Japanese language school which contained many people from Japan, but is now just a pile of rubble.

It's obvious that a lot of the infrastructure has been badly damaged, 50% of homes are without power, 80% without water / sewage and the gas supply has been turned off. It will take a lot of work to repair this.

Luckily the hospitals and airport suffered relatively little damage, with casualties being treated not just in Christchurch but all over the country.

Christchurch had a lot of old buildings, with a large number of these being severely damaged or destroyed, including the cathedral where 22 people are missing with the spire a pile of rubble and rubble filling the centre of the church.

This just seems to be unreal. Here in NZ we know we're on an active tectonic plate with thousands of small earthquakes each year. We've also got a few volcanoes and Auckland is built on a volcano field. But the reality of it happening like this takes a while to sink in.

This is worse than we imagined. I saw some fairly detailed news on the mess in Christchurch this evening. I hadn't known about all the sanitary and other problems. This thing was big. Is it true that several months ago there was a smaller event like this?

Hold on folks.

Charlie

Charlie wrote on Feb 23^rd, 2011 at 8:49pm:


There was a larger earthquake on the 4th September last year (7.3) which happened in the early hours of the morning, but miraculously nobody was killed. Since then there have been thousands of aftershocks, including a pretty bad one on Boxing Day (again no fatalities).

Tuesday's earthquake was technically an aftershock from the first one and a lot weaker at 6.3, but it was very shallow at only 3 miles and very close to the city centre (6 miles), it was this combination, along with already weakened structures that resulted in the devastation seen.

The current confirmed death toll, where there is a body which has been identified and relatives have been informed, is 92, but there are grave concerns for another 238. In one building they expect there to have been 120 people killed, which included a foreign language school with possibly 60 people from overseas missing.

To put things into perspective, the US population is 307 million compared to the NZ population of 4.4 million. Scaling the death toll to the US population means that the likely toll of 300 would be scaled to about 21,000. Scaling to the UK population (62 million) would give 4,300.

The Christchurch population is 376,000, which means that the earthquake killed about 1 person in 1000. Everyone in Christchurch will know people who were killed.

Some photos...

Dust cloud minutes after the earthquake
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Pine Gould building collapse
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CTV / language school building - it was a 5 story building where possibly 100+ people died
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Cathedral - 22 dead?
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A bus - 2 were crushed like this with fatalities
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A car - many died when rubble fell on vehicles
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Continuously saddening.  So terrible.

Sorry I'm late checking in with you, Mike, but I'm still out with clean-up crews after cyclone Yasi gave us such a touch up and electricity is still a bit of a treat.

Good to hear that you and our other Kiwi CHeads are alright but our heart goes out to all those affected. It's only a small ditch, mate, and we're ready to hop it while we're wanted or needed, just as you've always done for us.

The ANZAC spirit will always live.