Earthquakes
I found going back to Christchurch a very moving and emotional experience so I have devoted a whole page to the earthquakes that have affected the area.
Christchurch suffered a series of earthquakes between September 2010 and early 2012, with the most destructive of them occurring on 22 February 2011, in which 185 people were killed and thousands of buildings across the city collapsed or suffered severe damage. Up to 100,000 buildings were damaged and about 10,000 buildings needed to be demolished, leading to an ongoing recovery and rebuilding project which was ongoing during my Tiki Tour in 2018.
On 4 September 2010 a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Christchurch at 4.35am. Located near Darfield, west of the city at a depth of 6.2 miles, it caused widespread damage to the city and minor injuries, but no direct fatalities. On 22 February 2011 a second earthquake measuring magnitude 6.3 struck the city at 12.51pm. It was located closer to the city, about 6 miles southeast on the Banks Peninsula, at a depth of 3 miles. Although lower on the magnitude scale than the previous earthquake, the intensity and violence of the ground shaking was among the strongest ever recorded globally in an urban area. The impact of the earthquake was widespread with around 30 million tonnes of ice falling of the Tasman Glacier into the Tasman Lake about 120 miles away, hitting tour boats with waves up to 2.5 metres high. There were continuing aftershocks for some time, with over 4,500 above a magnitude 3.0 recorded in the region between 2010 and 2014.
The city’s iconic cathedral was severely damaged and lost its spire. On my last day of my holiday in 2008 I was sightseeing around the cathedral when a wedding ceremony started and the ushers invited all of us sightseers to join in the ceremony. I left New Zealand with very happy memories of the place so seeing the damage to the cathedral ten years later on my Tiki Tour was heartbreaking.
A few blocks away from the cathedral there are 3 iconic reminders of the earthquakes with a few metres of each other. An unofficial memorial for the individuals who died are represented by 185 white empty chairs. On the opposite side of the street is a small memorial garden, opened in 2018, on what was the site of the CTV building. The collapse of this building, which housed an English language school, resulted in 115 of the fatalities with people from more than 20 countries among the victims. A report has found that the building’s construction was faulty and should not have been approved. The building’s foundations have been left exposed in some places within the garden to serve as a reminder. Back across the street is the Cardboard Cathedral which was opened in 2013 as a temporary replacement for the Anglican cathedral. The Canterbury Earthquake National Memorial is located on the other side of the city along the banks of the Avon River.
Quake City is an off shoot of the Canterbury Museum that focuses on the earthquake. There are real time recordings of the quakes, real bits of architecture displayed from where they once stood, and video stories of people recounting their experiences. It is an extremely moving place and not to be missed if you want to understand the impacts of the earthquakes. Some of the images on this page are photos that I took in Quake City and these are denoted by (QC) in the caption.
On 14 November 2016 a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the South Island just after midnight causing the strongest ground movements ever recorded in New Zealand. Ruptures occurred on multiple faults and the earthquake has been described as the most complex earthquake ever studied and prompted the reassessment of a number of assumptions about earthquake processes. One resident in Wellington described it “like living on a sleeping dragon who’s waking up“. Many major roads were closed because of slips and damage to bridges and the railway track was damaged, effectively cutting off all land routes to Kaikoura. 1,000 tourists and hundreds of residents were stranded in Kaikoura, about 40 miles north east of the epicentre. The bay and the surrounding region in Kaikoura was uplifted by as much as 2 metres. The long term closure of State Highway 1 along the coast north of Kaikoura resulted in a detour through the Lewis Pass being the only major route from Picton to Christchurch. This inland route added 7 to 8 hours to a journey from Blenheim to Kaikoura which would normally take just under 2 hours. This part of the road was opened in December 2017 although there were many ongoing roadworks associated with the repairs when I travelled down the road in November 2018. More than 7 miles of the train line from Picton to Christchurch needed rebuilding and 3 miles of track realigned. This track was reopened in September 2017, though service was limited by continued landslides and repair work, and the passenger train service did not resume until 1 December 2018 only a couple of weeks before my journey on it.
