Earthquakes

When I was small, the biggest thing I feared (other than witches) was earthquakes.  There was something so inherently powerful and shocking, even to a small child, that there was a complete sense of being 'taken over'.  I remember plenty of earthquakes: in Wellington, in our small concrete flat where a child's scream for her mother took precedence over that mother's own fear; once in Wanganui where the look of utter shock on my aunt's rapidly paling face just reinforced my young belief that this was something even adults couldn't fix.

In 1963 there were several earthquakes in Westport where we had gone to live for a few years, quakes that shifted walls, brought down chimneys and closed schools for weeks at a time.  We didn't mind those ones for we were on holiday in Wellington anyway, and a week away from school was an unexpected pleasure, even though we did correspondence school during the mornings.  But even there, we experienced another bump in the middle of the night.  A warning, I thought, to tell me I wasn't safe on holiday, after all.

I distinctly remember when I was working as a junior secretary on the 6th floor of a high-rise building, again in Wellington, and I'd just gone to the bathroom when this one struck.  I can't tell you what haste I was in to get out of there!  I promised myself I would never work in a building higher than 2 stories after that.

There were plenty more quakes - when we lived in the centre of the North Island; even a very small one I detected one night in Canberra, Australia, and there wasn't a day that went past without a conscious thought of the Big One.  Everyone thought it would be Wellington.  No one suspected Christchurch.  That beautiful garden city has been battered and bashed by quakes this year, and just this week there were two huge aftershocks (6.3 on the R. scale) within two hours, right at lunch time.  The inner city was still closed due to the debris and uninhabitable buildings, but that didn't stop new damage being done.  In the past 7 days there have been 206 earthquakes.  You can see it all here: http://www.christchurchquakemap.co.nz/

I know there are all sorts of explanations for the quakes - new fault lines discovered and so on.  But when you look at Banks Peninsula which is at the head of Lyttleton, the target of most of the quakes, it makes you wonder about the fact that this was a major volcanic area, so why would there not be violent quakes as well?