 Here a few newspaper stories from the Christchurch earthquake archives that I have scanned for your interest. If you click the images you can see them enlarged at a good resolution....
The Wellington Independent, Volume XXIV, Issue 2847, 10 June 1869, Page 6, carried this story about the 1869 earthquake in Canterbury which severely affected Christchurch. NB: this was before the Cathedral was built.
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 SERIOUS EARTHQUAKE CHRISTCHURCH CATHEDRAL SPIRE KNOCKED DOWN. Runs the headline in this story run in the Evening Post, Volume XXXVI, Issue 54, 1 September 1888, Page 2. The news stories go for some time as to how the spire was repaired. It was a tall order.... Apparently some of the stonework ended up in Colombo Street.
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 HEAVILY SHAKEN, runs the headline in this Evening Post story, Volume CIV, Issue 152, 26 December 1922, Page 8. Not as strong as some of the previous ones. Certainly not as damaging as the Cheviot earthquake in 1901 described in my "Faulty thinking..." posting below.
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 ...here that news story continues. It's worth a read. Maybe it tells us all we need to know about why these previous earthquakes have been ignored - certainly by the media anyway. It's almost treated as a joke. It's always someone else - or someone else's chimney, or church spire, that falls down. Maybe it's better to laugh and joke about something you can't control. Sort of larikan kiwi laughing on the terraces while Christchurch crumbles.
Where does the memory of a city reside? Archives (where no-one goes)? Council (which sits on inconvenient truths)? Media (which does not want to be blamed for negativity - bad news stories turn off the investment tap)?
Maybe that's why we have the EQC - because earthquakes happen.
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1 comment:
Hi there -
this is some good digging, it is very interesting to note that earthquakes were part of the Christchurch historical landscape, so to speak, and that it's very much been the case that this fact simply fell out of our collective consciousness.
The info in the article all comes from www.paperspast.natlib.govt, but I'd just like to point out that there is also an interesting body of historic earthquake and seismic references in the newly-expanded online Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives (http://atojs.natlib.govt.nz/).
It strikes me that our predecessors weren't at all unaware of seismic activity in the Canterbury area.
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