As a recent migrant to the UK to Christchurch I can say it was a pretty scary experience and thank providence that it was at 4.35am and not 4.35pm!!!
To characterise the damage as widespread is a little media spin - there is some serious damage, especially to historical, brick buildings in the centre and surrounding suburbs and I suppose it is over a wide area, however I would estimate that 99.9% of the city is fine. What is interesting is that you can be on one street and everything is normal , you turn the corner and it looks like a bomb site for 100 metres then it is normal again. Kaiapoi, a small town of 12,000 just north of Christchurch, has not fared so well with over 400 homes condemned. Yet Woodend a few km's further up the road is virtually untouched. That I think has been the biggest surprise to the people I have spoken to - the small pockets of carnage in an otherwise unscathed environment. I sure that many papers and thesis will be written on why this phenomenon occurred as well as some serious re-evaluation on type of soil/bedrock that it will be permissible to build on. The event bought to mind a childhood song "The Wise Man Built His House Upon the Rocks". Building on sand in a known earthquake zone was perhaps a misjudgement. The word of the week is liquefaction - there is a great video here a 1964 that shows how the soil just turns to liquid, just as it did in Kaiapoi http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLZFlnND0hA Anyway here is a great site that shows an time-line animation of the quake and aftershocks http://www.christchurchquakemap.co.nz/ There have been around 400 aftershocks so far, mostly unfelt, the bigger ones are listed here http://lists.geonet.org.nz/pipermail/eqnews/2010-September/ Phil > Message: 9 > Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2010 16:53:01 +0900 > From: Andrew Errington <[email protected]> > To: [email protected] > Subject: [OSM-talk] Earthquake in Christchurch NZ last weekend > Message-ID: <[email protected]> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > In case anyone missed reading about it, there was a 7.1 magnitude earthquake > in Christchurch, New Zealand at the weekend. Miraculously no-one was killed, > despite widespread damage. This was due mainly to the fact that it happened > in the early morning, so people were asleep in their homes. If they had been > walking or driving through the city when it happened I am sure there would > have been many injuries and deaths (and more news coverage). > > Anyway, a helpful individual has made this: > > http://www.mapquake.co.nz/ > > And someone from ESRI (I think) in NZ has made this: > > http://s1.demos.eaglegis.co.nz/Flex/earthquake-christchurch > > I cannot find anything based on OSM, although I am not suggesting that someone > should do this, since it seems that is already covered. It's interesting, > however, to see the UIs that are being used, and also how willing the general > public is to contribute useful information to such a site. > > My questions are, is someone or some group using OSM as the data source for > similar public information services? Are there tools for people to make such > webpages easily using OSM? Is OSM ready for this? > > I apologise if this topic has been discussed in depth elsewhere. > > Best wishes, > > Andrew > > _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
