Quake-hit Christchurch struggles to get back on its feet

Quake-hit Christchurch struggles to get back on its feet

New Zealand’s second-biggest city, Christchurch, struggled to get back to business on Tuesday as aftershocks caused more damage and kept parts of the city cordoned off three days after a magnitude 7.1 quake.

The size of the business district area blocked off was reduced and bus services resumed, but schools remained closed and a state of emergency in the city of 350,000 people will remain until mid-Wednesday.

 

 

Aftershocks, the strongest with a magnitude of 5.4, were still rocking the region as Prime Minister John Key, who was brought up in the city, pledged to rebuild.

“The government will help alleviate bottlenecks and speed up the recovery phase,” he said in parliament.

“The government is prepared to step up financially to rebuild the region.”

Key cancelled a planned visit to Europe due to start at the end of the week, which included a meeting with Queen Elizabeth in Britain, to direct the government response to the disaster.

As many as 100,000 homes, about two out of three in the region, may have been damaged to some degree by the initial quake which struck early on Saturday.

The quake caused no fatalities and only two serious injuries.

Early estimates of the cost of damage have been put at about NZ$2 billion (RM4.37 billion), but the final repair bill may be much higher once damage to infrastructure is assessed.

Power has been restored to all but 1,000 consumers in the region, and water and sewage services are about 90 per cent restored. About 300 people are staying in emergency shelters. Civil defence authorities said about 5 per cent of the central city buildings that had been checked were unsafe, with about 16 per cent needing more engineering checks.

Some buildings judged beyond repair were being demolished as aftershocks rattled nerves.

“Now that everybody’s experienced the damage of the first one, everybody’s on tenterhooks,” said Irinka Britnell who owns a backpackers’ hostel,

Seismologists have said aftershocks are likely to continue for some weeks, possibly reaching magnitude 6.

The quake, whose epicentre was a previously unknown faultline about 20 km (12 miles) to the west of Christchurch, opened up a 22 km-long (14-mile) rip in the earth, with fissures of up to 4 metres (12 feet).

The quake was among the 10 strongest recorded in New Zealand and the most damaging since the North Island city of Napier was devastated in 1931.

New Zealand, which sits between the Pacific and Indo-Australian tectonic plates, records on average more than 14,000 earthquakes a year, of which about 20 would normally top magnitude 5.0.