The GeoNet website provides public access to hazards information, including earthquake reports, volcanic alert bulletins, near real time landslide monitoring data and latest tsunami gauge recordings.
The 2010 Chilean earthquake occurred off the coast of the Maule Region of Chile on February 27, 2010, at 03:34 local time (06:34 UTC), with a magnitude of 8.8 and lasting about three minutes. This is one of the largest earthquakes the world has experienced. The cities experiencing the strongest shaking – IX (Ruinous) on the Mercalli intensity scale – were Talcahuano, Arauco, Lota, Chiguayante, Cañete, Talca, Concepcion, and San Antonio. The earthquake was felt in the capital Santiago at Mercalli intensity scale VIII (Destructive).
Following the 1960 Chile Earthquake (magnitude 9.5) NZ experienced tsunami waves and wave surges causing damage to some areas. Click on the link for further information.
Within a few hours of the recent earthquake New Zealand’s eastern coastline was put on Tsunami warning, with alerts for some regions expecting the Tsunami to hit our outer most Island (Chatham Island) about 07:00 (NZDT) with waves hitting NZ about an hour later. Waves up to 1.5m were recorded both at the Chathams and the eastern coastline throughout the morning (lucky it was low tide).
As I’m sure you are all aware the 12 January 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake. Its epicentre was near the town of Léogâne, approximately 25 km west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital.
One of the Congress keynote speakers, Dr Sergio Mora has provided the blog with the following information and photos from his recent trip to Haiti.
Sergio has forwarded a set of pictures illustrating (before and after photos) the most typical examples of structural failures associated with the Haiti earthquake.
He makes the following comments:
“In some cases, I had the chance to take pictures, one or several months before the quake, during previous working missions.
As you can see, building practices in Haiti are extremely precarious. There was no building code in place, although there was already a draft which had been forwarded to the Government of Haiti by its authors on January 11th, 24 hours before the earthquake…!
On the other hand, some international companies, such as the telephone and internet provider Digicel, applied corporate standards and its 15 storeys building stood with no harm at all. In the pictures, you will also see totally collapsed buildings besides neighbouring structures, still standing and relatively harmlessly. So, selective damage must be the product of inconsistent practices. Perhaps even some minor care and common sense by builders, saved many structures.
It is clear that an M=7 event is quite a hit anywhere in the world, but we also have to admit that definitely not sufficient to generate the kind of damage that occurred. The extent and degree of damage was at least one or two orders of magnitude above what could have been expected just by complying to any average building code. The difference is indeed the very high vulnerability and the very low quality of design, location, building processes and quality control of materials.”
Thanks to Sergio for supplying the blog with some interesting photos and insights.
