The NZ quake

Buildings destroyed but no one was killed:

The powerful 7.1-magnitude earthquake that smashed buildings, cracked roads and twisted rail lines around the New Zealand city of Christchurch on Saturday also ripped a new 11-foot wide fault line in the earth's surface, officials said Sunday.

At least 500 buildings, including 90 downtown properties, have been designated as destroyed in the quake that struck at 4:35 a.m. (12:35 p.m. ET Friday) near the South Island city of 400,000 people.
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Canterbury University geology professor Mark Quigley said what "looks to us that it could be a new fault" had ripped across the earth and pushed some surface areas up about three feet (a meter). The quake was caused by the ongoing collision between the Pacific and Australian tectonic plates, he said.

"One side of the earth has lurched to the right ... up to 11 feet (3.5 meters) and in some places been thrust up," Quigley told National Radio.

"The long linear fracture on the earth's surface does things like break apart houses, break apart roads. We went and saw two houses that were completely snapped in half by the earthquake," he said.

Roger Bates, whose dairy farm at Darfield was close to the quake's epicenter, said the new fault line had ripped up the surface across his land.

"The whole dairy farm is like the sea now, with real (soil) waves right across the dairy farm. We don't have physical holes (but) where the fault goes through it's been raised a meter or meter and a half (3 to 5 feet)," he told National Radio.

"Trouble is, I've lost two meters (6 feet) of land off my boundary," he added.
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Experts said the low number of injuries in the powerful quake reflects the country's strict building codes.

"New Zealand has very good building codes ... (that) mean the buildings are strong compared with, say, Haiti," which suffered widespread damage in a magnitude-7.0 quake this year, earth sciences professor Martha Savage told The Associated Press.

"It's about the same size (quake) as Haiti, but the damage is so much less. Though chimneys and some older facades came down, the structures are well built," said Savage, a professor at the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at Victoria University in the capital, Wellington.
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New Zealand sits above an area of the Earth's crust where two tectonic plates [the Pacific and Australian plates] collide. The country records more than 14,000 earthquakes a year — but only about 150 are felt by residents. Fewer than 10 a year do any damage.

New Zealand's last major earthquake was a magnitude 7.8 in South Island's Fiordland region on July 16, 2009 — a temblor that moved the southern tip of the country 12 inches closer to Australia, seismologist Ken Gledhill said at the time.
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Wen Baragrey, who lives by the beach in North New Brighton in Christchurch with her husband and two children, described a chaotic scene to msnbc.com.

“The ground was moving so much, I fell on the way to the door,” Baragrey said by e-mail. Once she and her family got outside, “it was frosty and freezing cold. In the distance, I could see bright flashes of light around the city and hear explosions. Apparently that was the power transformers blowing.”

Read Wen Baragrey’s full account.

Before and after pics of buildings on Victoria Street in Christchurch: