7,500 Earthquakes Hit Shattered New Zealand City

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Posted at 02:46 AM on Monday, Jul. 18, 2011

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand — It’s been 10 months since the first big earthquake struck New Zealand’s second-largest city. It’s been nearly five months since a far more devastating one killed 181 people and crippled the downtown. And it’s been just a few hours since yet another aftershock startled Christchurch residents during the night.

“I stop breathing,” said Sheridan Cattermole, a bartender and a mom. “I get pins and needles all over. I either freeze or run. I just want things to be back to what they were like this time last year. I had my vege garden, and my sunflowers.”

Seismologists have recorded 7,500 earthquakes in Christchurch since September – an average of more than 20 a day. The rumblings are rattling the psyche of the still-battered city. They have left the land under thousands of homes unsafe to build on. Some people have left town entirely. Yet many have proven resilient, and some now see a reconstruction boom on the horizon.

Christchurch is the disaster that the world forgot. When the deadly quake toppled the iconic Cathedral spire and flattened buildings in this city of 390,000, people around the globe paid attention. But two weeks later, the massive earthquake and tsunami that left more than 23,000 dead and missing in Japan took center stage.

In New Zealand, the quake in Christchurch is reverberating. In a country of 4 million people, the cost of the quakes – estimated at more than $12 billion – amounts to 8 percent of annual economic output. Compare that to Hurricane Katrina, whose costs were less than 1 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. Christchurch will likely eclipse the Japan disaster in cost per person. 

And nobody knows if the worst has passed. Not even the experts.

When Kevin Furlong, a professor of geosciences at Penn State University, came to Christchurch on a sabbatical last year, he thought he would be studying earthquakes in the abstract – not living through them.

The quakes in the city have not followed the classic pattern, he said. Typically, a big quake hits and is followed by a series of ever-diminishing aftershocks.

In Christchurch, the initial Sept. 4 magnitude-7.0 quake didn’t cause widespread destruction because it was centered 30 miles (50 kilometers) west of the city, but it helped trigger at least two distinct new quakes on different fault lines, each with their own pattern of aftershocks.

First came a deadly magnitude 6.1 quake on Feb. 22, which was centered almost directly under a residential area and flattened buildings that had withstood the earlier quake. Then a 6.0 magnitude quake struck on June 13. Though no one died, it was a psychological blow to people trying to rebuild.

Earthquakes are maddeningly difficult to predict, Furlong said. There’s no way of knowing whether there’s more to come, he said, though the odds improve with each day that passes without a major event.

New Zealand geologists estimated last week that there was a 23 percent chance another big quake would hit within a year, down from 30 percent last month.

“I’ve become much more attuned to what the public wants to know: ‘When will it stop and why are we having them,’” Furlong said. “To be honest, it’s really frustrating. You just can’t answer those very appropriate first-order questions.”

That uncertainty is no comfort to people like Cattermole. She and her husband Pete, a cabinetmaker, and their three young children remained in their home in the working-class suburb of Bexley long after most neighbors had left.

As recently as late June, they were sleeping in the living room to escape the muck creeping through the walls and floor at the sunken rear of their home. Their ruined possessions lay in a heap in the front yard, awaiting an insurance assessment

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