An earthquake worse than the ‘Big One’? Shattered New Zealand city shows danger of Seattle’s fault
The 2011 earthquake that crumpled Christchurch, New Zealand, gives a
vision of the danger lurking under Seattle — and insights on how to
lessen some of the damage and bounce back.
HRISTCHURCH, New Zealand — The nine people on Red Bus No. 702 were
going separate ways on a Tuesday afternoon: to lunch, the doctor, work,
home. The youngest was 14, the oldest 78. At 12:51 p.m. on Feb. 22,
2011, most of them had seconds to live.
The
bus passed a cluster of old, brick buildings downtown, a place with the
grit and throwback charm of Seattle’s Pioneer Square. Below the soil
was a crack in the bedrock, similar to the one under Seattle, where
pressure that had built for centuries finally burst the city’s
foundation.
The earthquake shredded buildings and weaponized fragments of brick
and concrete, crushing scores of people eating lunch, shopping and
talking on the phone. The facade of one old, brick building, home to a
noodle shop, separated from its walls and broke over Red Bus No. 702. Almost six years later,
Christchurch’s ruined cityscape warns of the danger a few miles below
Seattle, where pressure is building to inevitable violence along a fault
extending from the foothills of the Cascades to Hood Canal. The
similarities to Christchurch give Seattle officials a rare insight into
what the city can expect to face.
Building
rubble and crushed buses line Colombo Street, a main route through
Christchurch, two days after the quake of Feb. 22, 2011, which killed
185 people. (Photo: Simon Baker / Reuters) | (Video: Ellen Banner &
Lauren Frohne / The Seattle Times)
New Zealand’s second-largest city and Seattle were settled in the 1850s, constructed of similar materials under similar building codes.
Each city also is situated above a fault that is relatively close to
the surface, exposing them to a blast of seismic energy far more intense
than deeper faults. An earthquake on Seattle’s shallow fault could cause more damage to the city than the so-called Big One, a magnitude 9.0 rupture of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, seismic experts say.
Seattle’s officials have two advantages that their counterparts in
Christchurch lacked: They’ve known about the fault for more than 20
years, and they can draw on New Zealand’s experience for ways to blunt
the damage and bounce back from it.
New Zealand had learned from its previous earthquakes. The country
created a fund in 1945 to cover earthquake damage to insured homes,
amassing $5.9 billion by 2010. The Ministry of Education had set higher
structural standards for schools by the late 1990s, so when the
Christchurch quake struck during school hours, there were no deaths on campuses. And after the tremors turned Christchurch’s historic district into rubble, the Parliament amended the national building law earlier this year to require upgrades to the most at-risk buildings.
For the most part, Washington state has not adopted such measures.
Seattle has yet to implement a policy to strengthen its most vulnerable
buildings despite decades of discussion. While Seattle Public Schools has spent millions retrofitting schools, poorer districts have struggled to raise the necessary funds.
Washington state doesn’t require insurers to offer earthquake coverage,
as California does, and the federal government doesn’t underwrite it.
The odds of a shallow fault rupturing somewhere in the Puget Sound
region over the next 50 years are greater than 1 in 7, according to the
U.S. Geological Survey. That’s three times more likely than picking a
winning Powerball number.
Joan Gomberg, a Seattle-based geophysicist at the USGS, toured
Christchurch after the February 2011 earthquake. The devastation “really
drove home in spades what can happen if an earthquake like that happens
under a modern urban environment,” she said.
Ann Brower sits on a bus like the one she rode downtown when the
February 2011 earthquake hit Christchurch, New Zealand. She had decided
to sit on the sunny side of the bus to read, a move that might have
saved her life. Everyone else on the bus died when the front of a
brick... (Ellen M. Banner/The Seattle Times)
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Ann Brower, 40, was reading a magazine on Red Bus No. 702 when it heaved upward and crashed back down to the street.
Brower, a North Carolina native, had come to Christchurch on a
Fulbright scholarship in 2004 and stayed, enchanted by its seaside
villages and rugged mountains rising up from the Pacific Ocean. She
taught environmental policy at a local university and was en route to a
meeting that Tuesday. Instead, she fought for her life.
The collapsed roof of the bus landed on Brower’s left hip, pressing
down until her pelvis snapped. Bone protruded from her left leg and she
fainted from the pain. When she came to, she could see little beyond the
gray roof that crumpled around her. She began screaming.
The earthquake had a magnitude of 6.3 — much smaller, in
energy released, than the magnitude 7.8 quake that struck more than 50
miles north of Christchurch in November 2016 and caused two deaths. It
was also smaller than the magnitude 6.8 Nisqually earthquake that shook
the Puget Sound region in 2001. But while the Nisqually quake was
centered 30 miles underground, this one ruptured just 3 miles below
Christchurch.
The February 2011 earthquake flung people to the
ground as they tried to run. It snapped off the spire of the city’s
namesake cathedral, damaging a landmark as emblematic of Christchurch as
the Space Needle is of Seattle. A government commission would later catalog where and how all 185 victims of the earthquake had died.
Two large buildings — the Canterbury Television and the Pyne Gould
structures — collapsed, accounting for 115 and 18 deaths, respectively.
The buildings, they fall out 2½ times their height, so there’s no place to run to.” - Ann Brower
A falling slab of concrete killed a 27-year-old American woman
rushing out of a tattoo parlor. A block away, a Canadian nurse shopping
for souvenirs died in the rubble. A storefront collapsed onto a New
Zealand woman carrying her 5-week-old daughter, killing them as they
walked just yards behind the infant’s father.
Eight people on Red Bus No. 702 died: the driver; a 41-year-old man
heading to an economics lecture; a butcher on his way to meet his young
daughters for lunch; an elderly couple on vacation; another couple going
to a doctor’s appointment; a 14-year-old boy whose school had let out
early.
People nearby heard Ann Brower’s screams from within the buried bus.
They ripped off the roof with their bare hands, freed her leg from the
seat crushing her and flagged down an SUV to get her to a hospital. She
was the only survivor.
Smash Palace was in a building before
the 2011 earthquake, but now operates at the same location out of a bus,
shipping containers and part of the old structure. The business
contains a restaurant, bar and motorcycle shop in downtown Christchurch,
New Zealand. (Ellen M. Banner/The Seattle Times)
Lara Simmons, a structural engineer in Seattle,
wasn’t prepared for what she found when she moved to Christchurch six
months after the February 2011 earthquake.
It wasn’t the city’s wrecked core — she expected that. It was the public depression that had set in.
“It’s kind of like that friend of yours whose parent is going through
a terminal illness and there’s a cloud that’s always over them. It’s
like the whole city had that cloud,” she said.
Christchurch had weathered a major earthquake only months earlier, in
September 2010, that caused billions of dollars in losses but no
deaths. In February, residents who thought they’d endured the worst
learned their ordeal had just begun.
The 2011 earthquake shattered water and sewer lines. Some residents
spent months without a flushing toilet. People dug latrines in their
yards or collected their waste in lidded buckets, according to Andrea
Cummings, who distributed buckets and chronicled her efforts in a
self-published memoir, “Would You Like a Toilet With That?”
Cummings and her husband had a lawnmower business before the
earthquake, but they gave up on it. “Nobody had lawns anymore,” she
said.
The government razed entire neighborhoods where it determined
rebuilding would be too expensive — an area that would cover much of
Seattle’s core, from Elliott Bay over to Broadway, from Mercer Street
down to South Jackson Street. The earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 damaged
almost 170,000 homes, or three-quarters of the region’s housing stock.
It was essentially as if a bomb went off. This is sort of what we may be dealing with here in Washington.” - John Schelling
Officials approved the demolition of eight of every 10 buildings
downtown. The military cordoned off portions of the city’s business
district for two years, displacing a quarter of the local workforce. The
shortage of undamaged buildings sent home and rental prices soaring far
above national rates.
Simmons stayed for a year and a half helping to rebuild Christchurch
before returning to Seattle in 2013. She joined a committee advising
Seattle on how to deal with the threat posed by its old, brick
buildings. She asked officials to consider what would happen if, as in
Christchurch, an earthquake displaced hundreds of businesses and tenants
at one time.
Simmons favored mandatory retrofitting for Seattle’s most vulnerable buildings.
For a time, it seemed like the city might do just that.
Photos
show how earthquake damage has changed downtown Christchurch, as seen
from the Pacific Tower building (now the Rendezvous Hotel). Manchester
Street is at left. (2010: Kirk Hargreaves/Fairfax Media NZ/The Press | 2013: John Kirk-Anderson/Fairfax Media NZ/The Press) The tab to rebuild Christchurch is estimated at $40 billion, a fifth of New Zealand’s total economic output. But the economy has been buoyed by earthquake insurance, a protection most Americans don’t buy.
In New Zealand, the government covers the first $100,000 of
earthquake damage to every house with homeowners insurance, along with
its contents and insured land. For this protection, New Zealanders pay
an annual surcharge on their homeowner policies — capped at $180 — that
the state collects to pay claims.
The government coverage made it more affordable for New Zealanders to
purchase additional insurance from private companies, and many did.
About 80 percent of the losses from the September 2010 and February 2011
quakes were insured, according to the government.
2016: Construction and restoration are
under way on some buildings, while whole blocks have been leveled across
Manchester Street. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)
Insurance was so widespread that private insurers paid out more for
the February 2011 quake than for California’s 1994 Northridge earthquake
— among the most expensive natural disasters in U.S. history — even
though the Christchurch quake caused less than half as much damage, according to insurer Munich Re.
“This city was the best insured city of its size ever to be hit by an
earthquake of this magnitude,” said Peter Townsend, chief executive of
the Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce.
Martin and Rae Francis, a retired couple living in a badly damaged
Christchurch suburb, didn’t have earthquake insurance. The government
offered them $50,000 to abandon their home, they said, but even with
their savings they couldn’t afford to buy a new one. They’ve stayed put
as the government demolished every other home in their neighborhood.
They dodge potholes on a road that is no longer maintained, boil their
drinking water and worry about vandals.
Even those with earthquake insurance dealt with frustrations. The
Earthquake Commission, the national insurer, was caught off guard by the
scope of the damage and had to increase its staff from 22 to 1,064
within five months. The rate of settlements was slower on average than
earthquakes in Japan and Chile around the same time, according to Marsh
Risk Management, an insurance broker. (A commission spokesman said the
comparison was flawed.)
Americans can seek disaster grants of up to $33,000
from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or apply for low-interest
loans from the Small Business Administration. Washington state’s
insurance regulator has said that no more than 15 percent of homeowners
carry quake coverage.
“If you think you’re going to rely on the federal government to ride
to your rescue, you’re going to be sadly disappointed,” said Mike
Kreidler, Washington’s insurance commissioner.
Martin and Rae Francis are the last
people left in their area of Christchurch’s Bexley neighborhood. The
land behind them was once filled with homes. Most of their neighbors had
earthquake insurance, but the Francises did not, and say they can’t
afford to move. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)
Ann Brower spent two months in a hospital with
broken bones in her pelvis, left leg, left hand and lower right spine.
Gradually, the public-policy professor considered the government’s role
in the carnage she survived.
Christchurch building officials in 1982 had flagged the building that
nearly killed her as a seismic danger, but it was never retrofitted.
The Christchurch City Council, like Seattle officials, didn’t require
upgrades unless an owner applied for a change of use or a major
renovation. The council was in the midst of crafting a new policy that
set deadlines for retrofitting buildings when the first damaging
earthquake struck in September 2010.
In the February 2011 earthquake, 97 percent of unreinforced-brick buildings that hadn’t been retrofitted either partly collapsed or sustained severe damage and killed 42 people.
“Everyone knows unreinforced brick collapses in earthquakes,” Brower
told The Seattle Times. “The question is why didn’t anybody do something
about this before?”
Brower was haunted by the people who died around her and how
inexpensive it would have been to secure the parts of buildings that had
crushed them. She noted that building facades, gables and parapets —
the brickwork that encircles a roof — are the cheapest to fortify, and
the most likely to fall in an earthquake.
Brower wrote newspaper op-eds, spoke before Parliament on legislation and secured private meetings with the building minister.
If you think you’re going to rely on the federal government to ride to
your rescue, you’re going to be sadly disappointed.” - Mike Kreidler
Last July, Brower accompanied a Times reporter to a gravel lot
downtown, where the building that collapsed around her once stood. New
Zealand’s Parliament had passed what is popularly known as the “Brower Amendment”
two months earlier, tightening deadlines to strengthen hospitals,
high-occupancy buildings and unreinforced-brick structures. For those in
regions of high seismic risk, they must be retrofitted within 7½ years.
Brower visited Seattle after her injuries in Christchurch and took in, with dread, the number of unreinforced-masonry buildings.
“The buildings, they fall out 2½ times their height,” she said, “so there’s no place to run to.”
More than a decade ago, a group of seismologists and structural engineers used a computer model to predict what a rupture of the Seattle fault might look like:
the shaking would turn loose soil to mush, destroy pipelines and roads
that would take years to rebuild, and kill 1,600 people. But the
devastation in Christchurch offered a real-life scenario, and reports
from the field poured into Seattle.
Mark Pierepiekarz, a local structural engineer, sent a colleague to
Christchurch and briefed the Seattle City Council five months after the
2011 earthquake. Councilmember Tom Rasmussen toured the devastation a
year later. Christchurch’s mayor at the time of the quakes flew to
Seattle to brief his counterpart, former Mayor Mike McGinn.
John Schelling, Washington state’s lead expert on earthquake hazards,
briefed the City Council in 2013 on the wreckage he saw in
Christchurch. “It was essentially as if a bomb went off,” he said. “This
is sort of what we may be dealing with here in Washington.”
Later that year, structural engineers and city officials heard from
Brower herself when she spoke in Seattle at an event sponsored by the
USGS.
Councilmember Richard Conlin pushed for a policy requiring retrofits
of unreinforced-brick buildings. An advisory committee in 2013 proposed a
mandatory retrofit policy, with deadlines based on the risk a building
posed to the public. But left undecided was who would shoulder the costs
of upgrades, and many building owners oppose them.
No legislation has been offered. In May, the city released a new count of unreinforced-masonry buildings, its ninth such effort over two decades. The advisory committee is scheduled to reconvene to discuss the latest survey on Dec. 6, its first meeting since 2014.
Without such a law, the most the city can do to strengthen
unreinforced-masonry buildings is to wait for a tenant or owner to apply
for a permit and negotiate a seismic upgrade — ranging from a full
retrofit to securing a parapet.
Rasmussen, Conlin and McGinn have left city government. Schelling has taken a new job at the Department of Commerce.
Simmons, who served on the committee recommending retrofits, has
returned to New Zealand. She isn’t surprised Seattle hasn’t moved
forward with a retrofit requirement.
“There’s a false sense of assurance,” Simmons said of Seattleites,
adding they don’t grasp how devastating a Seattle fault earthquake would
be. “I don’t think the city gets it at all,” she said.
An art installation on a vacant lot in
downtown Christchurch has 185 white chairs representing each of the
lives lost in the 2011 earthquake. Each chair is different — some given
by victims’ families — including highchairs, wheelchairs, dining chairs
and easy chairs. (Ellen M. Banner/The Seattle Times)
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