Wild Land

It is now two months since the shallow magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck near Darfield in Canterbury. The aftershocks continue, and residents who suffered damage are now working through the issues as they repair or replace damaged buildings and contents.

Saturday 6th November 2010

Here are some facts and figures for the Darfield earthquake sequence to date.

Mainshock:
Magnitude 7.1, struck at 4:35 a.m. on Saturday 4th September 2010. Centred 9 km south-east of Darfield, 20 km south-east of Coalgate, 37 km west of Christchurch at a depth of 10.9 km.

Aftershocks:
There have been twelve aftershocks of magnitude 5.0 or greater, and 135 with a magnitude between 4.0 and 4.9. Three of these struck during the first few days of November, and GeoNet expects that there could be another ten before the end of the month, based on past experience.

GeoNet has published the larger events on its website and has been kept busy processing data into its databases. This has made the information available to enterprising people such as Chris Crowe who has a fascinating rolling summary of the aftershock sequence on his website, Canterbury Quake Live. The 2,642 earthquakes analysed (22 in the past day) are presented in a graph which clearly shows the activity decreasing with time.

Claims:
EQC reports that it has now received 111,687 claims for damage caused by the earthquake sequence and 88,548 of these have been lodged from Christchurch city.

In a separate report, EQC reports 91,917 building claims, 36,364 contents claims and 11,895 land claims – a total of 140,176 claims. The discrepancy could be due to the regional summary recording claims for building, contents and/or land damage at a particular address as a single claim. To date $145 million has been paid out on 7,763 building claims ($131.5 million), 5,141 contents claims ($13.6 million) and about five thousand dollars has been paid out on four land claims.

GNS Science has published a special edition of GeoNet News which provides an insight into how the organisation responded to the events of September 4th. The special edition of GeoNet News can be read online here.

[Compiled from data provided by the GeoNet project and its sponsors EQC, GNS Science and FRST, and EQC media releases.]

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 6th, 2010 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Earthquakes - Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.