Dozens killed, scores trapped by New Zealand quake

WELLINGTON, New Zealand – A strong earthquake killed at least 65 people in New Zealand’s second-biggest city of Christchurch on Tuesday, with more casualties expected as rescuers worked into the night to find scores of people trapped inside collapsed buildings.

It was the second quake to hit the city of almost 400,000 people in five months, and New Zealand’s most deadly natural disaster for 80 years.

"We may well be witnessing New Zealand’s darkest day . . . The death toll I have at the moment is 65 and that may rise," said New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, who had flown to his home town of Christchurch, where he still has family.

The 6.3 magnitude quake struck at lunchtime, when streets and shops thronged with people and offices were still occupied.

Rescuers, working under lights in rain, focused on two collapsed buildings: a financial-services office block whose four stories pancaked on top of each other, and a TV building which also housed an English-language school.

Twelve Japanese students at the school were believed to be missing, an official in Japan told Reuters.

Trapped survivors could be heard shouting out to rescuers from the TV building. Local media say as many as a dozen or more people could still be inside. Relatives of those feared trapped kept a vigil outside the building as rain began to fall.

A woman freed from a collapsed building said she had waited for six hours for rescuers to reach her after the quake, which was followed by at least 20 aftershocks.

"I thought the best place was under the desk but the ceiling collapsed on top, I can’t move and I’m just terrified," office worker Anne Voss told TV3 news by mobile phone.

Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker described the city, a historic tourist town popular with overseas students, as a war zone. He told local radio that up to 200 could be trapped in buildings but later revised that estimate down to around 100 or so.

"It is a tragedy that is unbelievable," he said.

It was the country’s worst natural disaster since a 1931 quake in the North Island city of Napier which killed 256.

Christchurch Hospital saw an influx of injured residents.

"They are largely crushes and cuts types of injuries and chest pain as well," said David Meates, head of the Canterbury Health Board. Some of the more seriously injured could be evacuated to other cities, he added.

There are no reports of Canadians killed or injured in the quake, but a spokeswoman with the Department of Foreign Affairs said officials in Ottawa and at the Canadian High Commission in Wellington are closely monitoring the situation and will provide consular assistance to Canadian citizens affected by the disaster.

Betty and Jim Deeks, an Edmonton-area couple were in New Zealand to visit family, and were in the airport heading home when the earthquake struck.

Betty heard the sound of the earthquake first.

"For the first couple seconds I thought, wow, that’s a really loud plane flying close," she said. "That took a split second. Then you realize it’s not a plane. It sounds like a train going on top of your head."

"It was so loud, and everything just started shaking," said Betty. "You felt like – have you ever been on a small boat in the ocean? You can’t stand up straight. Everything is shaking, moving underneath you. You feel like you’re drunk. I never want to live through that again."

The couple ran to a large cement pole nearby, and then out of the building. Security told them to stand in the centre of a nearby parking lot.

Then they hiked two kilometres back to the car rental office to pick up a car again and head back to family in Timaru, a two-hour drive south of Christchurch.

As they were driving, an aftershock shook the whole car.

"We’re safe; we’re alive," Betty said. "So many other people have suffered so much more than us."

Christchurch has many historic stone buildings, and is popular with English-language students and also with tourists as a springboard for tours of the scenic South Island.

Emergency shelters had also been set up in local schools and at a race course as night approached. Helicopters dumped water to try to douse a fire in one tall office building, while a crane was used to help workers trapped in another office block.

Helicopters dumped giant buckets of water to try to douse a fire in one tall office building in Christchurch, while a crane helped rescue workers trapped in another office block.

"I was in the square right outside the cathedral – the whole front has fallen down and there were people running from there. There were people inside as well," said John Gurr, a camera technician who was in the city centre when the quake hit.

Authorities ordered major hospitals up and down the country to make room for quake victims. There were reports of a shortage of ambulances.

"A lady grabbed hold of me to stop falling over . . . We just got blown apart. Colombo Street, the main street, is just a mess . . . There’s lots of water everywhere, pouring out of the ground," Gurr said.

Emergency crews picked through the rubble, including a multi-storey office building whose floors appeared to have pancaked on top of each other.

Christchurch is built on silt, sand and gravel, with a water table beneath. In an earthquake, the water rises, mixing with the sand and turning the ground into a swamp and swallowing up sections of road and entire cars.

TV footage showed sections of road that had collapsed into a milky, sand-coloured lake right beneath the surface. One witness described the footpaths as like "walking on sand".

Unlike last year’s even stronger tremor, which struck early in the morning when streets were virtually empty, people were walking or driving along streets when the shallow tremor struck, sending awnings and the entire faces of buildings crashing down.

Police said debris had rained down on two buses, crushing them, but there was no word whether anyone had been killed or injured.

The quake hit at 12:51 p.m. at a depth of only 4 kilometres, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

"It’s huge, it’s just huge," a priest told a TV reporter outside the remains of the city’s stone cathedral, part of which had been reduced to a pile of large sandstone blocks.

"I just don’t know whether there are people under this rubble," he said, before he appeared to add in a quiet voice: "I think so."

The quake helped knock the New Zealand dollar down to $0.75, about 1.8 per cent off late U.S. levels, on fears the damage could dent confidence in the already fragile economy.

Westpac Bank also raised the possibility that the central bank could cut interest rates over the next few weeks to shore up confidence after the quake, while other banks pushed out their expectations for the next rate hike. ANZ now expects the central bank to be on hold until the first quarter of 2012.

Shares in Australian banks and insurers, which typically have large operations in New Zealand, fell after the quake. But credit rating agency Fitch said the tremor would not itself trigger a downgrade of New Zealand sovereign rating.

The tremor was centred about 10 kilometres southwest of Christchurch, which had suffered widespread damage during last September’s 7.1 magnitude quake but no deaths.

James Goff, of the University of New South Wales’ Natural Hazards Research Laboratory in Australia, said some buildings that survived last year’s quake had been weakened and unable to withstand the second one, especially such a shallow tremor.

"A lot of the infrastructure has still not fully recovered from the last earthquake so that would have still been feeling weak and susceptible to another big earthquake," he said.

The region has been struck by thousands of aftershocks since the original quake.

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.

With files from the Edmonton Journal.