New Zealand : 6.3 earthquake in Christchurch.

Christchurch as a population around 400,000, a reasonably sized first-world city. There was another earthquake in September last year, but it caused far less damage.

New Zealand Herald



A big difference compared to other events such as floods or hurricanes is, of course, that there is no warning prior an earthquake. Not even time to get yourself out of Dodge, let alone any gear.

Hopefully things aren't any worse than has already been reported. All the best to the Kiwis.

Huge event is a very small place. Best wishes.

Heard some radio interviews and video footage and it seemed as if the resources were completely overwhelmed. I wonder how much retrofitting was done since last September? Or if more effective emergency preparedness plans put into place? Lets hope so.

My wife and I spent a few days in Christchurch on our honeymoon six or so years ago. Very pretty city, wonderful people. Very sad to see what they're going through. The pictures of the collapsed tower at the cathedral are particularly poignant to me, as I remember my visit to that plaza vividly.

We stayed on the twelth (top) floor of the Holiday Inn Christchurch. Not, I would imagine, a great place to be during a quake. Of course, we had other things on our minds at the time and did not even consider the issue.

With all that is going on around the world right now, we're all getting lots of opportunity to armchair quarterback survival situations - some, sadly, more appropriate for Zombie Squad than ETS (see Libya).

Let's learn all we can to keep ourselves and our families safe, but not forget that there is tremendous suffering going on angst real people. I wish there were more I could do to help.

My heart goes out to the residents of Christchurch and visitors who have been caught up in this. I had a very nice visit there several years ago (spent a month in NZ -- fantastic).

New Zealand is the one country I'd leave the U.S. for in a heartbeat. Spectacular scenery and friendly people, really a very special place.

And dangerously situated in an extremely geologically unstable region -- astride two tectonic plates. Definitely a place to be up to speed on earthquake preparedness, but even that's not enough when in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Best wishes to everyone affected by this tragedy.

You and me both.

Does it make sense to write your congressman and ask what kind of aid we're sending our ally?

Also, you can be more effective helping out nearer to home if you're already trained, equipped and part of the team. Look into joining your local CERT at https://www.citizencorps.gov/cert/ if you haven't already.

We are in the middle of a fiscal crisis and a hot topic in DC is whether the federal government will shut down over a budget impasse.

If you want to help, best to donate your own money directly to NZ organizations, such as the New Zealand Red Cross. Here's the link:

http://www.redcross.org.nz/cms_display.php

The New Zealand Herald will probably also be linking to charitable organizations:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/

Photos here

"Specialist teams" are in route from the U.S. Fatality estimates are now around 300. I think that would make it the most deadly incident in N.Z. history.


http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10708156

Mayor Parker urged people to stay at home, saying the city was effectively "closed" for at least the next three days.

"We don't want you out driving and looking around. As we found in September those roads are lifelines."

Mr Hamilton said Australian search and rescue teams were due in Christchurch early this morning.

Mayor Parker said specialist teams were coming from Japan and the United States and the BBC is reporting that the United Kingdom is sending a 62-strong search and rescue team with more than nine tonnes of equipment.


USAID (foreign aid) issued a release:

http://www.usaid.gov/press/releases/2011/pr110221.html

Relevant Links:

NZ Earthquake Incidents GIS:
http://eqviewer.co.nz/

NZ Ministry of Civil Defence:
http://www.civildefence.govt.nz/

Environment Canterbury - Earthquake Page
http://canterburyearthquake.org.nz/

Google
http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/christchurch_earthquake.html

Twitter Tags:
#eqnz ( picked up by GIS and MoCD above)
#chch ( monitored by MoCD above)
#nzeq

Relief efforts for peops and pets:


http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10708187


Christchurch quake: How you can help

ShelterBox.org is taking donations to deliver their rescue box thingies to New Zealand. I don't know how good of charity they actually are, but they seem okay.

-Blast

I don't understand why the flooding after the quake.

Dam break? Liquification?

Sue

Liquifaction. Here's an article on Christchurch's susceptibility that was published after last September's big quake:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/science/news/article.cfm?c_id=82&objectid=10671607

If anyone wants to see how Twitter can be used for Corporate emergency communications, check out @TelecomNZ ( www.twitter.com/telecomnz ). Pretty awesome.

Thank you, Dagny!

I was wondering if it was something like that after all the heavy rainfall they got recently, but I couldn't find it.

Sue

Here's an interesting map showing this week's 6.3 quake and the September 7.1 magnitude quake. This most recent quake was a lot closer to Christchurch (10km v. 30km) and shallower (5km v. 33km).


http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10708171

"Old fashioned" analog landline phones are in demand in Christchurch and residents are being urged to text instead of talk on their cell phones.


http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10708337

Telecom had also started a campaign to collect "old fashioned" analogue landline phones, which do not require electricity, from around the country to distribute to people in Christchurch without power.

Also local water and sewer main breaks.

Just following up, here's another story:

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Christc...8367/story.html

Hang in there, Kiwis.

It's being reported that the degree of liquifaction in this 6.3 quake was orders of magnitude worse than in last fall's 7.1 quake. Must be crazy to see the water and silt seeping up through everything.

ETS members in quake country -- do you all know the liquifaction potential in the areas in which your homes and workplaces reside?

As I recall from news reports of the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, San Francisco's heavily damaged Marina District was known to be on land prone to liquifaction.


Video:
http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/liquefaction-across-christchurch-2-23-video-4039338

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/natural-disasters/news/article.cfm?c_id=68&objectid=10708723

Christchurch earthquake: Levels of liquefaction 300 - 500 pc worse

By Hayden Donnell and Paul Harper

http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~es10/fieldtripEarthQ/Damage1.html

Basically, if you are situated on deep, fine grained sediments or on land that has been created by filling in an estuary or bay (the Marina situation) you are susceptible to liquefaction.

I once worked at Liquefaction City, the Channel Islands National Park Visitor Center, which is situated right on the beach, on sediments that are thousands of feet deep. Seemed like a bad place for a visitor center; I found out that the building is built on deep pilings that presumably will counter the liquefaction. We will find out some day. In any event, our significant museum collections are not kept in the building, but are some distance away in a non-LQ situation.

I believe that in California the earthquake hazard maps display liquefaction zones, so the information is readily available.

I have vivid memories of surfacing after a hard day's scuba diving (work, not recreation), hoping to catch the World Series, and instead watching the Marina District burn...

Article on how the Christchurch destruction is relevant to the U.S. west coast -- including Oregon's Willamette Valley.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110222152504.htm

"The latest New Zealand earthquake hit an area that wasn't even known to have a fault prior to last September, it's one that had not moved in thousands of years," Yeats said. "But when you combine the shallow depth, proximity to a major city and soil characteristics, it was capable of immense damage.

"The same characteristics that caused such destruction and so many deaths in Christchurch are similar to those facing Portland, Seattle, parts of the Bay Area and many other West Coast cities and towns," Yeats said. "And it's worth keeping in mind that New Zealand has some of the most progressive building codes in the world.

They are better prepared for an earthquake like this than many U.S. cities would be."


NYC more vulnerable than previously thought?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/...ne-2223545.html

"Cities like Christchurch, which are only known to lie on a fault once an earthquake occurs, are much harder to protect against. Recent seismological studies have suggested that major cities like New York and Beijing, which are situated far from tectonic plate boundaries, may in fact be more vulnerable than previously thought to seismic shifts."

Smarter emergency managers that I know are keeping track of the inventory of unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings in their areas, because in a local quake those will be the first to go down, and go down hard. And there are handy maps of our liquefaction prone areas, they are well known. The ChCh quake was shallow and lasted for ~45 seconds, an eternity for anyone there. When Seattle has its EQ, it will last upwards of 4 minutes. Liquefaction areas - much of downtown Seattle, some northern neighborhoods, the entire industrial area and harbor area of Harbor Island - will be turned to jello, impassable. Building codes are like opinions, everyone has them - and little of the built environment is built to the most recent code, usually it has been retrofitted to an earlier code. And even those codes were built for outdated EQ scenarios, such as 45 second temblors rather than 4 minute shakes.

People are funny this way - if the magnitude of an EQ event is too scary or too catastropic to deal with by a sane building code, they will actively work to define the problem in a way that they can deal with and mitigate. This is going on right now - Seattle wants to build the largest tunnel in the world (?) to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which runs along the waterfront behind a seawall (which is also failing and in need of repair). Now, there's no doubt that the Viaduct needs to be replaced, the problem is that city fathers and planners have grand plans for the space that would be opened up by an underground tunnel; the real problem with a tunnel is it will be forced through an area extremely prone to liquefaction. Tunnel collapse, inundation with seawater, even tsunami are some of the risks. So they are going great lengths to re-define the threat scenario, including choosing a EQ that is not the most damaging possible, nor are they choosing the most likely shake scenario, which will go on for minutes, not seconds. And of course, not answer in a definitive way, what if Puget Sound experiences a tsunami? The curt answer is, if a tsunami hits we have other crises to deal with. Which begs the question, why a tunnel, when an above ground throughway can be constructed to replace the Viaduct, at much lower cost, and built to survive tsumanis and EQ damage. That's an inconvenient question, as long as so many have so much money invested in all the new found waterfront that building a tunnel could open up. In the end, you can ask the question, will the new tunnel survive? The answer is Yes, to the question asked for a ChCh style quake: if you ask the harder question, could this tunnel survive a 4 minute shallows Seattle Fault quake, the answer gets much sketchier.

Apparently the Seattle city fathers have decided in favor of drilling their tunnel, and when The Worst Happens someone else will have to deal with that. The law of averages says it won't be them anyway. I would be happy if they started by asking the right questions, and if they still came to this answer, then so be it. Never underestimate the power of denial...

Tunnels are not my favorite thing, would be terrifying in an earthquake.

Waterfront real estate is extremely alluring to city planners.

When living in San Francisco, the thought of commuting everyday on the BART train that goes under the San Francisco Bay was always a frightening thought until I saw something on TV that mentioned that that particular tunnel was much safer than you would think.

I'm sure every underwater tunnel is different, but in this case, the expert mentioned that ground movement is generally less intense as you go down into the earth, compared to a thin, swaying skyscraper, so the tunnel would be subject to less shaking than above ground structures. Plus, being a tunnel, they are naturally quite robust in their construction.

Anyway, still a frightening thought, but it did make me feel better about it. (crossing fingers)

I thought this was an interesting picture of the situation that puts it in a different context. From a distance you can see it is a wide area, downtown, and considering that the majority of that dust is a result of damage to buildings, catastrophic.

http://scienceblogs.com/catdynamics/2011/02/christchurch_moments_after_the.php

Hey y'all

I live in Christchurch, and life here hasn't been a lot of fun lately. But I have learned a few things about coping with a natural disaster. One of the things that don't seem to get mentioned much is the aftershocks. Since the magnitude 7.1 earthquake in September, we've had more than 4000 aftershocks. We were getting at least one magnitude 5 quake every month and they were still causing damage. The damage caused by the Feb 22nd quake last week actually stemmed from 3 shallow quakes within about 15 minutes. The ground acceleration was 2.2 G. The building code here is for 1.8 G at most. You can literally see the ground moving when you're outside - some of the aftershocks were violent enough to knock us off our feet.

Anyway, some things I have learned:
1. Storing 3 days supply of water is not enough. Even reserving it for drinking, we seemed to go through it faster than expected. Had to put the chickens on tight rations, before the water tanker got to our area.
2. If you're planning on using your hot water cylinder as a source of water in an emergency, make sure it can be drained even if the mains water supply is out. Our new cylinder was installed 3 days before the quake (old one got cracked in the September quake). It won't drain if there's no water going in to it. I assume that's to stop the heating element from burning out if the cylinder got drained while the element was still on. There's probably a way to drain it manually, but with the violence of the aftershocks no-one is going up in the roof space to find out.
3. As well as storing water, keep some clean empty bottles too. That way when a source of water is located, you've got something to put them in. Or you can give them to the friends and family who ignore all the constant public service messages about how to prepare for a disaster, and find themselves queuing at the water tanker with nothing but a dirty mop bucket.
4. And speaking of which, you can never have too many buckets. Make sure your collection includes one big enough for an adult to stand in - you can use that for washing yourself, clothes, the baby etc. Remember that if water isn't coming into your place, chances are you may also be having trouble getting rid of waste water. Our street is humped up outside and liquefaction has caused pipe damage so the sewer is backing up. So we're trying not to put much down the plughole. Have a few lidded buckets too, good for emergency toilets. A good big bowl is useful for washing dishes too.
5. Chances are the cellphone networks are going to be jammed within 5 minutes of a sudden disaster. That's what happened to us, text messages weren't going through, or took hours to get through and arrived out of order. One change I'm going to make is add contacts to an emergency notifications group on my phone so I can send one brief message to everyone as fast as possible. Cell phones did help save the lives of some people trapped in collapsed buildings. Something else I found out was that if the cell phone towers near you go out, your phone chews through a lot of battery power connecting to the next nearest tower. People's phone batteries ran down very fast.
6. Just because you have a car doesn't mean you're going anywhere in a hurry. Much of the city was completely gridlocked within 15 minutes of the quake.
7. Don't underestimate your emotional and mental response to a disaster. Frequent violent aftershocks which have been going on for months here, really make everyone anxious. I think the only other situation you could compare it to would be living in a war zone. The aftershocks can mean very little sleep for many days (they were coming every 15 minutes all night last week). This really does take a toll on your mental state, and your health. Your short term memory starts to go - we call it "earthquake brain" here when someone can't seem to focus on anything. Results in very poor driving

So I'm going to give us an 8/10 on disaster preparation this time around. 3 days supply of water - check, but should have stored more. Several months supply of food - check (got downright embarrassing when people keep trying to give us stuff - the only thing I ran out of was chocolate). Back up means of cooking and boiling water - check. But I should have done some trial runs with the thermette (volcano kettle). Campfire cooking takes some practice. Emergency toileting - gotta work on that one, having a backyard overlooked by the neighbours is not helpful. Solar camping shower - check, very useful, but nothing strong enough to hang it on in the bathroom, might put a heavy duty hook in there. Tent, so we could sleep on the lawn when the house was shaking - nope, still haven't got around to that one, thought it was overkill. Might rethink that one now

Very impressive and sobering first post. Thank you very much. Living in EQ country myself, I find your feedback extremely relevant and useful.

Best wishes...

i'm glad you're ok sealander. great post. very insightful - thanks!

Welcome to ETS, Sealander. Thank you very much for your keen insights into living through a catastrophe. For all my research I will not presume to be able to know what the reality of such a situation would be like. I lived in Los Angeles for a decade but was never at the epicenter of a major quake.

How are your neighbors doing? Are frayed nerves causing problems?

How long were you without power?

Continued best wishes and condolences to you and your community. I'm still checking in on the NZ Herald everyday.

Very good post, Sealander!

Just a thought on the hot water cylinder... could you have cut into the pipe between the water source and the tank to let air in so the contents could drain into containers?

"Emergency toileting - gotta work on that one, having a backyard overlooked by the neighbours is not helpful."

Are you familiar with the online book Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins? It deals with exactly that kind of situation, and is cheap, simple and safe.

Re: the solar camping shower. I saw this in a campground and thought it was absolutely brilliant! Make an outdoor shower stall by hanging a common kid's hula hoop from any overhead support using three evenly-spaced cords or wire. Use the usual rings to hang a couple of shower curtains from the hula hoop. The people I saw using this were keeping the curtain edges closed in the breeze with clothespins.

I'm glad you're doing so well. I was wondering how much the people there were into preparedness.

Sue

Dagny, the neighbors we were on chatting terms with pre-earthquake are doing ok. Can't say for the rest as a natural disaster is apparently not enough to make them sociable
The police say domestic violence incidents are up 50% so yes, much of the population is somewhat stressed.
The house next door already needed to be repiled as a result of the September quake so I would expect that it is damaged further. One further down the street also already had some bad foundation damage and is much worse now but the tenants are staying put as it is impossible to find another rental property, and they still have their jobs.

At least 70,000 people have left the city so far. Many of them will return if their jobs are still available - 50,000 people worked in the inner city area that is currently cordoned off, and businesses are already trying to relocate if they can, or are working out of employee's houses.

I live on the south side of town, a few blocks from the cordoned off inner city area. We got power back on within 12 hours. Some eastern suburbs still have no electricity because the power lines ran underground there and soil liquefaction has caused serious damage to the underground infrastructure. Basically they fixed the easy stuff first, and anything else is going to take a lot longer.

Susan, the hot water cylinder is way up in the roof space and very difficult to access, so no way I'm going up there while the house is still jumping around. I expect there is a way to drain it manually, but we weren't so desperate for water that we were going to mess with it. I'll will have a word with our plumber at some stage and find out what is the correct way to drain it - I've yet to receive his bill for installing it as the post has only just started up again
Very glad I insisted he fit seismic restraints so it didn't come through the ceiling.

Yes, I have heard of the Humanure Handbook though I've yet to read it.

I do like that idea of using a hula hoop to suspend a shower curtain from, that is clever. I would have rigged something up with tarpaulins if we'd needed a long term solution. As it was we used a bucket for urine and a plastic bag for everything else. I would have just used a lidded bucket inside and buried the waste in the garden, but we couldn't spare the water to wash the bucket out and I figure that would get pretty stinky if you don't have any odor neutralising material available.

As for folks being into preparedness, well I guess they're like people everywhere and despite regular public service messages exhorting you to be prepared to take care of yourself in an emergency there always seem to be people who ignore this. And of course there are plenty of people especially on the east side of town who are struggling to live from day to day anyway, so they have difficulty purchasing anything in addition to their day to day needs. That is what I saw when working in an evacuation centre last September - the people we got there were the ones who didn't have more than a few days of food in the house anytime, or who didn't have family support networks. Anyone who had friends or family who could take them in went there, and anyone with the financial resources to get themselves out of the city for a while packed up and went.

"Susan, the hot water cylinder is way up in the roof space and very difficult to access..."

Yes, I understand that, but where does the water come from BEFORE it goes into the tank? Is it piped in from underground, where the pipe might be reachable with your feet on the ground?

Sue

I would say the mains water pipe comes in underground from the street, goes under the house, then up through the walls to the roof.

Welcome to ETS Sealander and thanks for sharing your experiences. For keeping portable toilets less stinky you could try using small animal bedding from the pet store(pine/cedar wood shavings), sawdust, cat litter, fire ash, peat moss, etc. I used to keep cat litter for just such a purpose but switched to small animal bedding due to weight. Good luck and stay safe.

A sprinkling of lime on the pile will also sweeten things up.

Good first post. Can you say more about how much water you used, and what for?

Welcome and thanks for your comments!

Brangdon, we didn't actually use up all our stored water. The issue was that since we didn't know where we were going to get more from for the first 4 days, I was trying to keep a tight rein on how much we went through. After 4 days there was a water tanker in our part of town, and I think after 5 days we had very low pressure mains water (both sources have to be boiled). After 6 days there was a supermarket open that we could get to on foot.

I store 3 liters of water per person for 3 days. Usually there are 3 people in the household, plus currently 11 chickens, 3 chicks, and 1 cat. So we have around 27 liters of water stored, probably more like 30 as the bottles are not all the same size. Plus 4 or 5 liters of fruit juice and a couple of liters of long life milk in cartons.

We used the water for drinking, and for making hot drinks. I think everyone was suffering from mild shock the first day or so, and being able to have something hot is very comforting. We also keep water with disinfectant in a bowl which is used for handwashing. It gets changed every couple of days. We use hand sanitiser as well, but if your hands are actually dirty you need to be able to get the dirt off before you sanitise them. Due to soil liquefaction sewage contamintated silt is blowing everywhere and gets into everything.

Once we could go refill bottles at the tanker, we started using water for occasional dish washing, hand washing a few clothes and a little for cooking (washing vegetables from the garden, and in a steamer).

It was the chickens that I'd failed to plan adequately for - I have a bunch of young ones that I was raising to sell, so there are several separate pens. Anyone who has ever kept chickens will know it is pretty difficult to find a way to provide them with water that they don't manage to foul (I swear some of them just like washing their feet or something) I've tried numerous purpose made water dispensers and in the end I just gave up and use open containers that are changed every day. I was relying on a small rain barrel to provide extra water for them, but I hadn't checked it recently. It turned out that the tap was slowly leaking, so there wasn't much water for them. I did collect a bucketful of rain water one day when it rained so that helped.

So, we certainly haven't seen the last of the quakes (a shallow 4.8 jolt just last night). The seismologists say that even when things have settled down, we can still expect one in the 4-5 magnitude range every month on average for at least a year.

I will continue to make additional preparations as finances permit, but I've held off on installing rain barrels on the house as the place already needed repairs from damage in the September quake, and now more extensive repairs will be needed as the foundations are damaged. Due to the enormous number of claimants, the public insurance scheme that covers us for earthquake damage moves exceedingly slowly.

Thanks. It sounds like a matter of never having too much water. That plus the animals.

The liquefaction phenomenon in the Christchurch quake was astounding. They're now looking at being unable to rebuild 10,000 homes in their current location.


http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10710770

Christchurch areas to be abandoned
8:22 PM Monday Mar 7, 2011


"The liquefaction damage from the second earthquake is so great, and the land damage, the early indications are, that it is so significant we can't remediate it in any timeframe."



http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10710570

Mr Blackler said one neighbour who had left had told him he ran out to the driveway when the quake hit.

"He saw cracks appear and then the stomach of the ground gurgled and everything came gushing out."

The world's focus moves on but disaster victims' nightmare lingers or even worsens:


http://www.nzherald.co.nz/christchurch-e...jectid=10710587


Christchurch earthquake: New living hell
By David Fisher
5:30 AM Monday Mar 7, 2011


...no time could be set for restoration of water and sewerage, as the huge amount of damage underground was thwarting repair efforts.

...St Heliers Cres resident Kevin Guy said the lack of toilets and housing threatened to send the disaster out of control. "People will die of this."

He said elderly residents in his street tried to go to the toilet outside in yesterday morning's rain.

"I live near a woman in her 70s who broke down crying, too embarrassed to go to the toilet in a bucket."

There are always solutions to these issues such as the tree bog and the composting toilet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composting_toilet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_bog

In theory, maybe. I wonder if it's that simple in practice. The hurdles to getting these things up-and-running today, for this many people, are substantial.

To my mind, the density of people in an urban area makes it unlikely that the available soil and trees handle the nutrient load. Cities, by definition, remove most of this capability in their construction.

The combination of soil liquefaction with its drainage issues, plus additional rain, start to raise public health risks.

The other wild card is access to the necessary resources. Cities, again, do not have masses of raw materials at hand. Straw, sawdust, wood chips, peat, charcoal, etc. -- these are needed to make composting systems work.

I think they'll end up with big collection bins for plastic garbage bags of human waste. That's what can be done in short order.

(BTW, thanks to the link to the tree bog. I hadn't heard that term. I guess my modified outhouse is half composting toilet and half tree bog. Next step is the wind turbine vent system, supplemented by a thermal wall.)

Interesting satellite map (found link on boingboing.net) showing land lifts and drops as a result of the Christchurch earthquake:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12668190


EDIT: Also, evidence that our Kiwi friends have not entirely lost their sense of humour: "An enterprising fellow in Christchurch is auctioning off the 25-tonne boulder that destroyed his building as a "landscape feature" with proceeds going to the ChCh Earthquake Relief Fund." I'd put in a bid, but postage is a worry ...

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/03/05/christchurchian-auct.html

To undertake what they call land remediation prior to rebuildings house, I believe they have to heavily compact the ground with pile drivers, among other things. It's a lot more expensive than building a house in the regular way, and since many of the eastern suburbs have been severely affected by liquefaction twice in 6 months now, there's no guarantee it won't happen again. And as for the sewer and water pipes, and underground power cables, the entire infrastructure gets badly damaged every time the soil liquefys.

Those folk who actually have a backyard where they could bury their waste found that in areas of severe soil liquefaction that any hole you dug tended to fill at once with water. Also the yard may well be buried under a foot or two of contaminated silt.
As for building a composting toilet, note that:
a) If you didn't already possess the necessary materials, you had no chance to obtain them, as the majority of stores in the city were not open for several days following the quake. A great many of them will never be open again, at least in their original locations.
b) Once there were stores open, most of those able to get up and running quickly were on the west side of town. Access to and from the eastern suburbs ranges from difficult to downright impassable, and coupled with very heavy traffic, it's not unusual for journeys across town to take many hours.
c) Not wanting to stereotype these things, but the eastside is something of a lower socioeconomic zone. People there are less likely to possess personal transport. Limited bus services have only just gotten going again.

I've noted when using a bucket or hole in the ground myself that it may be okay for the young and able bodied, but your grandma is going to do far better with something she can sit on, and preferably not a portaloo 2 blocks down the street when she is in a hurry. Portable chemical toilets are now being distributed, which should help relieve the situation. Part of the delay in getting enough portaloos out seems to be due to the fact that they've had to import a pile of them - I guess there just weren't enough in the whole country.

Unique account: this fellow was on a surfboard near the epicentre.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12578016

He was surfing at the time the quake hit. "All of a sudden I got this jerking feeling. I thought a shark was biting my board. I honestly thought I was being attacked by a shark," he said.

"I turned around and there was no shark there. But the water started doing these bizarre patterns. There was a change in air pressure. Up and down motions, and then I looked at Sumner and all the cliffs were falling down."

"...your grandma is going to do far better with something she can sit on, and preferably not a portaloo 2 blocks down the street when she is in a hurry."

I don't know about toilet seats there, but many/most of them here are made from painted wood.

How about this suggestion:

Remove existing bathroom toilet seats and screw blocks to the underside (choose screw length carefully) that will coincide with the inside of a 20 L bucket or a wooden box lined with plastic bags.

Sue

Okay, here's the straight _ _ _ _ on creative evacuation devices in NZ (it's from the Web, so it must be true):

http://www.showusyourlongdrop.co.nz/

Thanks for the link. Those are funny and probably legit. I imagine peops are getting creative.

The moment you have all been preparing for has arrived, folks - the world has run out of chemical toilets:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christch...hemical-toilets

We did use a plastic bag in the existing toilet, Susan. I really can't figure out how you'd fit a bucket in ours though. I've noted on trips to the US that American toilets seem to be somewhat larger than NZ toilets, and they use a lot more water.

People have come up with some great solutions involving cutting holes in old outdoor furniture, and there was one guy who kindly made a nice sort of rectangular wooden box arrangement with a hole in it for his neighbour, and then found himself in great demand to make them for everyone in the street. Instant business opportunity

I would have made some effort to come up with more of a long term solution if the mains water and sewage had been off for more than 5 days, but I have added a portable cardboard toilet to the emergency supplies for future events - these guys make them:
http://www.thebrowncorporation.com/

Interesting cardboard concept but I have visions of a heavier user falling into his or her own bog standard sh*t box when it gets a little damp. The results could be even more distressing for the user than even using the 'worst toilet in Scotland'. Yes there is a Youtube video!!

I have been assured that the cardboard toilets have been tested with up to 120 kg (and no-one in my household weighs that much). You aren't supposed to get them wet, so it is something I would use indoors, then bury the results in the biodegradable bags that come with it.

On a side note - I'd like to know more about the "worst toilet in Scotland". Where exactly is that YouTube video? Should I drink a lot of beer before watching it?

other Pete

"We did use a plastic bag in the existing toilet, Susan. I really can't figure out how you'd fit a bucket in ours though. I've noted on trips to the US that American toilets seem to be somewhat larger than NZ toilets..."

Well, I can't see any reason to put a bucket into a toilet...

1) Detach the toilet SEAT from the existing toilet and take it onto the porch.

2) Affix smallish blocks to the UNDERSIDE of that toilet seat that will keep the seat from sliding off the top of the bucket.

3) Set the detached toilet seat on top of the bucket and use.

Sue