New Zealand earthquake: Tsunami follows powerful tremor
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
We were evacuated and let back in. All the planning in the world doesn't prepare you for the real thing, the first thing you're meant to do is keep calm, and I sure as hell didn't. I sprinted right the fuck out of my apartment building, I have 4 levels above me, hiding under a table wasn't going to do shit to save me.
The building has some cracks in the plaster and food has fallen off all the shelves, but nothing serious. The water seems to be running a bit brown though, so maybe some damage to the water pipes.
Props to the crew at Bizdojo (http://www.bizdojo.com/) for opening an invitation for us to come and chill there if we couldn't get back into our homes. Doing the right thing there!
Have water on hand beforehand! It's not like bottles of water aren't for sale everywhere.
We've got a small collection of life straws/survival supplies for tramping, which is good, but they're in a part of the house that'd be inaccessible in a major event :/.
The usual advice is to boil the water if there is any doubt. For sediment, a coffee filter first wouldn't be a terrible idea.
Edit to add: immediately after an event, if you have a tank water heater, the water in the tank was already there. If you shut off the intake valve and turn off the heater, you have enough drinking water to last for a couple of weeks. Assuming you can get a container under the drain valve on the side. Triple check you have turned off the furnace before draining any significant amount water!
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ncu7cINaZiE/TtGHnDoH72I/AAAAAAAAAS...
That's the yellow sticker that buildings in Wellington get if they're unsafe but still usable.
Only sort of. We have the whole dynamic of pushing out the date buildings are supposed to be meeting requirements, and dodgy engineers signing off on buildings that are below target NBS.
Most of the out of date buildings are empty, there are still a few empty buildings around Wellington because they don't meet code.
> I have 4 levels above me, hiding under a table
> wasn't going to do shit to save me [...] food
> has fallen off all the shelves,
~200km?
Also in Wellington, and it's work from home day today here while engineers check the building for damage.
It looks like the quoted epicentre was just the start point of the rupture that headed off to the northeast. Which explains why the shaking seemed worse to the north and why so much activity seems to be recorded from the Seddon area again:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us1000778i#...
In Wellington it seemed like the first half was just a gentle swaying before it really kicked in for the second half. That was probably the rupture moving closer.
I found this really interesting: The USGS talks about quakes of this magnitude usually have a wide scale area of slippage eg they've modelled 200x60 km for this one:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us1000778i#... http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us1000778i#...
https://twitter.com/thefoehesought/status/797814348672421888
The longest quake I've ever felt too. Some seismologists are speculating that it might actually have been two distinct quakes happening at roughly the same time.
Nevertheless, NZ infrastructure is built to withstand this sort of stuff. Only $100m-1b economic damage is expected, no casualties expected.
Nevertheless I hope everyone is OK and wish you the best. I've experienced quite a few earthquakes in my life, although nothing over 7, and the shock stays for long. It's one of those times in your life when you feel completely helpless.
Building maybe. But our main transportation routes often have little redundancy and go through some potentially hazardous areas. State Highway 1 down the Kaikoura coast is a great example. Hopefully Lewis Pass survived ok.
It was most likely caused by a movement of sediment into the Hikurangi Trough.
I'm in Palmerston North a long way away, but that was the biggest quake I've felt.
http://i.stuff.co.nz/national/86420960/earthquake-strange-gl...
General consensus is something to do with the power grid.
So it might cause some faults that are about to rupture to release a bit earlier than otherwise, but it's not a useful predictor of anything.
And wow, this looks heavy. I hope everyone is well.
It's British (probably Commonwealth) English for serious or important. See usage 6: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/heavy (unfortunately, no dates given on the quotes).
This lists the usage meaning "severe" as from 1849: http://historicalthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/category/?id=15861...
It comes from the idea of a "heavy wipe-out", which can quite easily occur while surfing "waves of consequence". Generally good, hollow, barrelling waves contain more water volume and energy, when they break they look and feel "heavier" and while being better rides, have more potential to injure a surfer. The slang has indeed made it's way into everyday usages in NZ and Oz and Hawaii, I guess California also.
I believe the original poster is describing a serious or unpleasant situation, which seems to be the case.
English is a Germanic language, so perhaps in a sense this meaning has always been part of it. As you point out, even if it's not considered completely idiomatic most people would have no trouble interpreting the meaning.
You've inserted yourself in a conversation occurring a tremendous distance from the events, and it's not like the comment was even making light of the situation.
And it was a conversation about a disaster as it was happening in complete real time, one which resulted in a loss of life, displaced families, and hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars worth of damage. It wasn't a past event which can be trivialised, it was being trivialised as people were being pulled from the rubble of their homes and workplaces.
This particular conversation was occurring between people, some of whom were far away from the events and some of whom were being shaken as they typed.
I also have prior experience with disasters, I provided technical support to the engineers in the NZ Urban Search and Rescue teams in Christchurch, and saw the devastation first hand as I was setting up remote offices within the red-zone and rescuing computer equipment from buildings that were missing walls. I also saw people working frantically to extract survivors from collapsed buildings as we went by. I lived in the same house and often shared rooms with those engineers that were doing the rescuing work, and I saw the harried expressions on their faces every day.
So I reserve the right to ask people to respect the situation at hand.
Here's some of the interesting stuff I've found on the internet about today's earthquake (that they're now calling a 7.8):
1) real-time Buoy data, for helping to determine the likelihood of a Tsunami: http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/ Interestingly, the quake only caused a tiny change in the sea level (in the region of 5 cm's) but the expected swells on land are in the region of 3-5 meters. I believe this is because as the wave gets closer to land, it get's funneled into a smaller area, meaning the 5cm change in sea level gets amplified. Which is why it's hard for the civil service to accurately predict whether a tsunami is likely when these events occur (That, and the nearest working buoy is in Tonga), which would by why they almost always say yes, and then retract the warning later.
2) the USGS science-y explanation for what actually happened. The take-away seems to be that this may have increased the stress on the primary fault in NZ. Interestingly, their's a a suggestion that the rupture was across the hope fault, rather than along it, which helps to explain why the after shocks have been so varied (by location): http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us1000778i#...
3) also from USGS, a map indicating affected regions, with town populations, and the likely economic impact of the quake: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us1000778i#...
4) The Canterbury Police shared a link earlier that indicated 3-5 meter swells is around the maximum we should expect from a locally generated earthquake (due to the nature of fault lines in NZ), that's not to say we can't experience a larger tsunami, but that said tsunami would have to be generated externally (like say, south america), which should in theory give us more time to prepare. But like all things, this isn't a hard and fast rule.
5) there's a pretty cool video of what purports to be lights in the sky over wellington during the earthquake (probably has something to do with magnetic interference from the energy released by the quake): https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%...
6) stuff have had pretty good live coverage here: http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/86416304/live-north-canterbu...
7) The USGS website indicated that the quake lasted around 2 minutes, with the highest intensity coming around 50 seconds into the quake.
The amplitude of the tsunami wave in the open ocean is much smaller than wind-generated swells but they can have periods of 60-70 minutes so they are more of a surge that just keeps coming when they hit land, and as you say when they start to feel the bottom they stand up and the large volume of water in the wave makes it stand up larger and more powerful than you would expect for a smaller amplitude swell.
Every wave has a peak and a trough and the trough of the tsunami wave is what causes the water levels to recede so drastically before the wave hits.
Geographic features like valleys that get narrower and narrower will cause the same volume of water hitting the coast to make a much more drastic change in water level
Here's one from Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0YOXVlPUu4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IKIazZc-a8
It doesn't look like much is happening at the beginning. It doesn't look like a wave, or a front of water. But it's a lot of water, and it's fast.
http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/ENGLISH/GUIDE/BOSAI/
It has a lot of good practical information -- especially chapters 1 & 4. We all got one sent to our homes, and I thought it was quite useful!
[1] https://rocketlabusa.com/rocket-lab-launch-complex-1-ready-f...
Christchurch seems particularly prone to quakes in New Zealand. I hope the people of New Zealand are safe.
From what I've seen, this is pretty similar to San Francisco. It would be interesting to see data comparing the standards across earthquake-prone countries/regions.
To be honest I think you're probably safer in a large earthquake in a post Christchurch NZ than in a small earthquake in a country that doesn't usually get them.
New Zealand in general is very quake-prone - our nickname in Victorian times was "the shaky isles". In fact our country owes it's existence to a particularly nasty intersection between the Australian and Pacific plates, with the Aussie plate slipping under the Pacific in the South Island, and vice versa in the North Island. You might think that the bit in the middle would be particularly dangerous, and you'd be right. Now guess where we built Wellington, our capital city?
Finally, there was a nice anecdote about some US hotel guests standing in the cold and dark after being evacuated from their damaged hotel. Asked if this had changed their mind about moving to NZ, they replied "Hell no, Trump is a far worse disaster than this!".
Literally within seconds of a shake, the preliminary report hits their website, and its confidence level increases over the next few minutes as more data reports in.
I believe their online (open) data set now catalogs all NZ-region earthquake events from like the last 80 years or something. Pretty neat.
Here is the page for the big one of 6 hours ago, not to be confused with the dozens of also-large aftershocks following it:
https://www.geonet.org.nz/quakes/region/newzealand/2016p8580...
Scroll to the bottom and look at the chart of cumulative energy (moment) release over time. This is probably the easiest visualization what you're looking for without going to scientific papers. It only goes back to the 1970s though. The big steps are the Sumatran earthquakes and Tohoku (Japan). There were some equally big steps in the 1950s.
As far as I know (and I do this professionally) there is no evidence for any real variation in the global, time-averaged rate of earthquake occurrence or energy release. However the time window to average over has to be several decades to centuries depending on how comfortable one is with noise. Any individual segment of a fault will have an earthquake repeat time (for a significant earthquake) of hundreds (San Andreas fault) to tens of thousands of years, and is lots of evidence for clusters of earthquakes on individual faults or sets of faults, but this is mostly a local effect--the stress changes in the crust caused by an earthquake can basically load nearby faults and affect when they will have the next earthquake. But again, this is for the most part local (<100 km). Globally, earthquakes are essentially unrelated. That a big one may hit Chile and then Japan in short order is happenstance as far as the seismological community is concerned (though it's not dogma, and long-distance 'teleseismic' triggering is investigated--it just doesn't seem to be a big deal).
However, earthquakes in the news aren't a good reflection of global seismic statistics. Earthquakes like the Italian events (M6-6.6) over the past few months (and years) occur every day, but mostly in the ocean basins and don't affect people other than shaking some palm thatch roofs in Vanuatu. The most deadly event (minus tsunami) in my lifetime was the Haiti earthquake in 2010, killing ~200,000 people, and it was a pretty routine, moderate-magnitude event. It just hit an incredibly vulnerable population.
https://youtu.be/WcljQHCUm_o?t=20
News say it's 7.4 - 7.8 magnitude.
Argh, had to look that one up. 'Just after midnight local time'.
EDIT: I see others have already corrected this misinformation.