New Zealand Shakes: Life on the Ring of Fire
When we were traveling in Costa Rica about ten years ago, we woke up in the middle of the night to the bed and building shaking — dirt and dust coming down from the ceiling and a muffled sound that you couldn’t quite identify but it sounded just… wrong. Brains fuzzy from sleep, we figured out it was an earthquake but we couldn’t decide whether to run for the bathroom, run for the door, or grab a mattress and cover ourselves. We were lucky — it was a strong quake but no one was killed and we were uninjured.
That is the only time in my life that I’ve experienced a really strong quake. We had them all the time when I worked in Alaska but they were small — most of the time you’d only know an earthquake had hit by the slight rocking of the trailers that the fish were shipped in.
New Zealand is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire and gets about 20,000 earthquakes a year, with about 200 of them strong enough to be felt. Auckland can still get earthquakes but Wellington and the South Island see them more often.
In 2011, there was an earthquake near Christchurch in the South Island. It was “only” a 6.3 on the Richter scale but it was devastating — 185 people died, most of them from the Canterbury Television building which collapsed.
I went to Christchurch for the first time in December 2015, almost five years after the quake. Much of downtown had been rebuilt, but there were many areas that had not. Buildings still standing but empty. Entire neighborhoods simply gone — the houses completely torn down, leaving only the trees and shrubs that once adorned the yards. You drive through and the land is just empty. It’s very sobering.
Building codes have evolved and a lot of buildings in NZ are being retrofitted to better withstand future earthquakes. I noticed that buildings in Wellington advertise their seismic rating. I laughed at that the first time I saw a sign. And then the next time I was in Wellington there was an earthquake — not a big one, but it rocked the bed and definitely could be felt. So no more laughing for me.
Updated September 2016:
There was a 7.1 earthquake in the early morning hours on 2 September — we woke up to a slow but unmistakeable rocking in Auckland that lasted about 15 seconds. It looks like everyone was okay and it was a long way from here, but so disconcerting. When I wrote this post originally I was comforted to see that Auckland wasn’t in the most dangerous zone. Mother nature scoffed at that.
Updated November 2016:
Two months after my last update, New Zealand was hit by something far bigger. Just after midnight on 14 November 2016, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck, causing significant damage to buildings and infrastructure in southern Marlborough and northern Canterbury. Two people lost their lives. The earthquake ruptured along a record 21 fault lines — GeoNet described the 180km rupture as the earth “unzipping” itself. Parts of the South Island are now more than five meters closer to the North Island. We felt it in Auckland. At this point I have stopped being surprised by anything this country’s geology does.
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