Data shows first Canterbury quake deadlier than thought
The Canterbury earthquake of September 4, 2010, was one of the biggest shakes in New Zealand’s recent history and was notable for the fact no-one was killed. That now appears to be wrong. The magnitude 7.1 earthquake centred in Darfield shook Canterbury awake at 4.35am and caused immense damage in the region. It was followed by another devastating earthquake centred near Lyttelton on February 22, 2011, that took 185 lives. Official histories record one fatality in the Darfield quake, but this was an indirect death which occurred when a woman ran from her home during the shake and had a heart attack. A little-known paper entitled ‘Patterns of earthquake-related mortality at a whole country level’ could result in the rewriting of the official record. Written by scientists in 2018 and published in the American journal Earthquake Spectra in 2020, it found a fatality directly associated with the ground shaking. The death occurred when the person was thrown off their toilet and onto the floor. No other details about the victim are given in the paper. Coronial Services has tried to find the coroner’s report on the death but have come up empty so far. Deaths in earthquakes from falling or tripping are rare. The paper identified only 13 earthquake deaths between 1840 and 2017, caused by trips, falls or being struck by a non-building related object. Two of these deaths were in the Hawke’s Bay earthquake in 1931 when a boy fell onto a spike and another when a man was knocked off his couch. Four people died in the Christchurch 2011 earthquake due to injuries from falling or tripping during the shaking. The main author of the paper, structural engineer Shannon Abeling, a research fellow in the engineering department at Auckland University, said the extra Darfield death had been discovered by a data group using ACC records to check the death toll. ACC contributes to the cost of funerals where people die in accidents. Otago University epidemiologist Nick Wilson, who co-authored the paper, said that in reality, all earthquake deaths are underreported. Statistics did not pick up cardiovascular deaths caused by the various pressures resulting from a traumatic earthquake-related event, he said.