Wellington, July 16: New Zealand’s southern region shook Thursday with hundreds of aftershocks after the country was hit by its most powerful earthquake in 78 years, which measured 7.8 on the Richter scale
Seismologists who monitor the 14,000 quakes recorded in New Zealand every year said most of the aftershocks were too small to be felt but five exceeded magnitude 5. Usually, only about 20 tremors of this strength are logged annually.
Checks confirmed that the country appeared to have escaped any casualties or serious damage from Wednesday night’s magnitude-7.8 rocker, centred off the south-west coast of Fiordland, even though its size matched the one that devastated the North Island city of Napier in February 1931, killing 256 people.
Lance Dixon, a spokesman for the Earthquake Commission, an official body that compensates quake victims, told the New Zealand Press Association that nearly 200 claims had been lodged by mid-afternoon but were for minor damage to wallpaper, bricks and house exteriors.
The Insurance Council’s chief executive, Chris Ryan, said that although the big quake was reported to have been felt more than 1,400 kilometres away on the North Island, it was described as producing a rolling motion rather than sharp jolts, indicating minimal damage was likely.
Goods toppled from shelves in shops in the Southland province, and power supplies were cut in some areas, but civil defence officials who flew over the epicentre of the quake, 100 kilometres south-west of the lakeside resort town of Te Anau, reported few signs of damage apart from a few landslides on the steep Fiordland mountainsides.
The quake was about the same magnitude as the one that devastated the Sichuan region of China in May 2008, leaving at least 68,000 people dead.
Seismologists said New Zealand escaped the devastation China experienced because the quake was centred off the coast of the country’s most sparsely populated region.
The biggest previous quake in the Fiordland region, of magnitude 7.1 in August 2003, caused considerable damage in Te Anau, resulting in nearly 3,000 claims to the Earthquake Commission.
—–Agencies