NEW ZEALAND: Christchurch: Looking Forward One Month After the Quake
At 4.35am, on the 4th September 2010, the city of Christchurch in New Zealand’s South Island was hit by an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale.
It’s epicentre was close to the township of Darfield, 40 km (25 miles) west of Christchurch. There was widespread damage and power outages, two people were seriously injured and one person died from a heart-attack during the quake.
Originally I wrote here: anyone who lives along the Pacific Ring of Fire might have thought, “that could have been us.” 90% of all the world’s earthquakes and 80% of all major earthquakes occur along the Ring of Fire, which extends from New Zealand through Indonesia and the Phillipines, through Japan along the Aleutian Islands and along the west coast of the Americas.
Then, on the 11th of March just off the coast of Japan a huge (8.9 )earthquake hit. The tsunami it triggered killed at least ten thousand people, and injured many more. It caused massive damage to the northeastern coast of the country. Perhaps more than anyone else in the world, people in Christchurch understood and empathised. (more…)