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Chapter 1: What recent discoveries have been made about Auckland's fault lines?
A frantic search for survivors is underway in New Zealand tonight after a devastating earthquake struck the South Island city of Christchurch. Dozens of people are reported dead now. Hundreds of people still trapped in that rubble.
It was terrifying. I thought I was going to die. New Zealand is no stranger to devastating and deadly earthquakes.
The biggest earthquake to hit mainland New Zealand since the early 1800s has left two people dead, damaged roads and buildings and cut power to thousands of properties. A 7.5 earthquake struck near Hanmer Springs just after midnight. It's effectively cut off Kaikoura.
It's caused extensive damage to homes, roads and other infrastructure around Marlborough and it was felt across much of the country. Yes, Wellington, we are undergoing a fairly dense earthquake at the moment. So please just get to somewhere where you are safely under some protection because this is long and rolling and it has been going and getting worse every five minutes.
We're interrupting scheduled broadcast to bring you breaking news of a big quake in Gisborne who is of 6.1 magnitudes.
But until now, Aucklanders have been more worried about volcanic eruptions, tsunamis or cyclones. Now an unsettling discovery has just been made hidden underground beneath our streets in our biggest city.
Dozens of previously unknown fault lines have been uncovered. Work is now underway to find out if they are likely to cause earthquakes.
And the likelihood of this?
Any fault line that has moved in the last 125,000 years we would call active and has the potential for future activity.
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Chapter 2: How could the Mangatangi Fault affect Auckland's seismic safety?
The thing about it, it's the perception that we have in our country about earthquake hazards that has helped us in a way to ignore Auckland. And that's because we live on a plate boundary. And that's the Hikarangi subduction margin. It sits off the east coast of New Zealand and then it transforms into the Alpine Fault and runs through the South Island.
The closer you are to that margin, the higher the seismic hazard, in a way. I'm oversimplifying a bit, but it's one way to think about it. And so Auckland is just further away than a lot of places in New Zealand to that margin. But if you actually compare New Zealand to most places on Earth... all of our towns and cities are actually close to a tectonic margin.
And so there's no reason that there's just a boundary where earthquakes are going to end because our country, in the end, as though we like to think it's quite big, it's actually quite small and it's very tectonically active.
The big question is, how worried should we be as Aucklanders thinking, my God, A, is this going to trigger a rupture? Are we going to die? Are our properties safe? How worried should we be?
Yeah, so what I like to say is that we should probably be alert but not alarmed. We're collecting these data to get insights into how we should plan our cities, not so much how we should be worried about what's going to occur a week from now or a year from now in a lot of ways. We want to think about, do we have good seismic strengthening for our city?
Is all of our critical infrastructure secured? Just in the very unlikely event that this will happen. In the end, I personally am not concerned on a day-to-day basis about an earthquake, but I am concerned when I think about the long term and the generational legacy that we leave to future generations is really what my concern is.
Because the likelihood won't be in our lifetime, but that of our grandkids and great-grandkids, they're the ones who should be more worried.
Yeah, we're working towards, hopefully over the next 10 years, to really get a good understanding of the likelihood, but I will say informally that it is very unlikely during our lifetime, but we do really need to think about future generations in our country and our city.
What happens now? So you've located and identified that there are fault lines. What happens now?
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Chapter 3: What is the potential magnitude of earthquakes from Auckland's fault lines?
It broke windows. And we would definitely expect the Mangatangi Fault would have an order of magnitude more shaking in Auckland, and then in the CBD region, by inference, you should be feeling that, I imagine, if you were up in Warkworth. I wouldn't be too worried that you'd be getting serious damage to any of your buildings, though.
In case you are wondering if the iconic Sky Tower in Auckland will survive a powerful earthquake, the answer is probably because it's, quote, very secure. That's it for today. The Detail is a Newsroom production supported by RNZ and New Zealand On Air. Thank you to James Muirhead. This episode was produced by Alexia Russell and engineered by Phil Bench. I'm Amanda Gillies. MÄ te wÄ.