Christchurch holds prayers for quake victims; death toll 147

There is still hope to find more survivors.

Yes Sarge you are right there is still hope to find more survivors but not in this particular disaster I'm sad to say.

In other buildings maybe, hopefully sarge is right. But judging from the pictures on NHK news tonight, nobody is coming out of the CTV building.

Think maybe something more than just a building design problem happened there. Liquefaction, or some kind of freak wave and resonance combination hit the building, physics stuff that I don't understand. Sad for so many people to lose their lives in just one building, looks to be about 30 or 40% of the total fatalities.

GJDailleult, It's pretty easy to understand, it was a 6.3 mag quake at 5km, with an epicentre about 5-10 minutes drive from the central city. The quake caused peak acceleration of 1.8g (compared to 0.5 of the Haiti quake). It was a big quake! And many of the buildings that were already stressed from the original Sep quake couldn't take any more.

There is an interesting article in the LA Times (search: New Zealand quake raises questions about L.A. buildings) which says that the ground acceleration of the quake was more than 2g, which would make it among the most powerful in terms of ground-shaking acceleration on record. One thing is for sure, I would hate to see what a big quake would do to Tokyo.