Measuring Cracks

University students helping clean up people's yards. (They are all off school for a week and a half. It's so great to see how many people are helping out others, and how much kindness is coming out in everyone. Even people who's houses have cracked in half were so happy to let us come assess the movement. Maybe it's because it could have been so much worse, and people are just so happy it wasn't).

Yesterday and today I was out with a team of grad students and professors from geotechnical engineering and geology assessing displacements and soil liquefaction. This data will be put onto a map by geography grad students (GIS) and we will use it to get directions & quantities of ground movement that occurred in the Christchurch area (important for geotechnical earthquake engineering design). There is still a week or so of work left to do. After I left our area of town where very little damage occurred, I was pretty shocked to see what other people are going through. A guy from the tramping club spent 30 years re-building an historic brick house (it was beautiful!) and him and his wife barely made it out alive when the earthquake hit. A lot of people living near rivers had major liquefaction problems, and displacement of their foundations. It's crazy to see how much fine sand came rushing up through all the tiny cracks in the pavement and around houses (and how much bigger they got). Supposedly the aftershocks may continue for 2 or 3 months. Unfortunately they are causing more damage, and slowing the recovery process. It won't be quick to get the city completely back to normal. But on the other hand, construction companies and contractors that had very little work before now can't keep up with the demand. Every cloud has a silver lining.