NZ town of Gisborne rocked by major earthquake

AFTER-shocks continue to shake the Gisborne area on the east coast of New Zealand's North Island after a 6.8 magnitude earthquake flattened buildings in the centre of the town last night.An apartment block and two shops collapsed, several roofs caved in, winery vats burst and gaping holes opened in roads. A state of emergency was declared this morning as another tremor, registering 4.5 on the Richter scale, struck. Geological and Nuclear Sciences duty seismologist Warwick Smith said the after-shocks were expected to last for some time, although most would be “minor”.“It’s hard to say exactly how long they’ll go on for, but we’ll be recording them for weeks,” he told the New Zealand Press Association.“Most will be small, and especially as it’s off-shore, most won’t be felt.” He said the quake was felt as far away as Dunedin, at the bottom of the South Island, and that no tsunami had occurred.
Cleaning up
The clean-up continued at Gisborne Hospital after water tanks on the roof overflowed, causing flooding and minor damage. Lighting was also lost for about 30 minutes. Eleven people were treated for minor injuries. Tairawhiti District Health Board chief executive Jim Green said it was a “very frightening experience, because of the magnitude of the quake and the fact that you’re in a multi-storey building, so it did shake a lot”. “Immediately nurses did a really good job in helping to calm patients and check that nobody had been injured, which was the case. “There was concern from patients about the fact that there may be after-shocks, that the building may have been damaged but we were able to very quickly ascertain that the building was safe.”New Zealand scientists record around 14,000 earthquakes a year, of which around 20 are greater than 5.0 on the Richter scale.The last fatal earthquake in the geologically active country, caught between the Pacific and Indo-Australian tectonic plates, was in 1968 when a quake measuring 7.1 killed three people on the South Island’s west coast.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22958178-2,00.html

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