Thursday 17 November 2016

5 things I now understand about earthquakes that I didn’t a week ago



This wasn’t going to be the topic of my next post, but you know, shit happens, and as somebody who considers themselves an outsider to this New land we call Zea, as well as somebody with an addictive habit for writing about everything, it seemed appropriate to give you some thoughts from the front line of shudder city.

You can’t predict the damage
The earthquake that hit near Kaikoura on Sunday night/ Monday morning was much bigger than the one that gave destroying Christchurch a really good go in 2011. The Kaikoura area has been badly damaged but the devastation is nothing like the scale of that which followed the Christchurch quake. This tells me two things:
1.       It’s not always the size of the quake on the Richter scale that’s the true indicator of how damaging an earthquake can be, but where the epicentre is and how deep underground it is, and
2.       The risk to personal safety is vastly reduced when a quake happens during a time of day when people are not at work or travelling.