228 still missing, quake’s toll seen rising

Huge boulders rest where they landed between buildings in Christchurch suburb of Sumner, New Zealand on Thursday, after the city was hit by a 6.3 magnitude earthquake Tuesday.
Huge boulders rest where they landed between buildings in Christchurch suburb of Sumner, New Zealand on Thursday, after the city was hit by a 6.3 magnitude earthquake Tuesday.

— The death toll from the earthquake that struck Christchurch this week will likely rise as rescuers search for more than 200 missing people among the rubble of buildings brought down by the nation’s deadliest earthquake in 80 years, New Zealand authorities say.

“You’ve now got what is looking like a very significant fatality toll,” Prime Minister John Key said in an interview with Television New Zealand today. “That is really unnerving people and rightfully so.”

Rescuers have recovered 113 bodies after the 6.3-magnitude temblor that rocked the nation’s second-largest city Tuesday, and say that figure is likely to rise. Some 228 people are missing, according to the Civil Defense department’s website.

Police on Thursday released the names of victims for the first time. Of the four local residents, two were infants.

About 500 search-and-rescue personnel are working in Christchurch, including teams from Australia, the U.S., Taiwan, Japan and Singapore, said Michael Mead, a spokesman for Civil Defense. A team of 57 rescuers from the U.K. will arrive in the South Island city today to help search for victims trapped in business-district office buildings. No one has been pulled out alive since Wednesday afternoon.

http://www.arkansas…">New Zealand quake

“It was just a scene of utter devastation,” New Zealand Police Minister Judith Collins said Thursday after visiting the ruins of the Canterbury Television building, where police said as many as 120 bodies could be buried. “I have never seen anything like it. If you saw it on a movie or a news screen, you’d think someone’s made it up.”

Hospital emergency departments have admitted 594patients after the earthquake, and 11 people are in intensive care, said Mead.

Christchurch residents are bracing for more aftershocks, which threaten to topple buildings already weakened. The city has been shaken by dozens of aftershocks since the initial quake, and may experience more temblors greater than magnitude 5 in the coming days, according to the Civil Defense website.

New Zealand straddles the boundary between the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates, making it susceptible to earthquakes. As the plates grind against each other, stress builds along fault lines, or cracks in the earth’s crust.

On the edge of Cathedral Square, the dome of the 105-year-old Regent Theatre crumbled. Parts of the facade of the 108-year-old Clarendon Hotel are on the footpath and lie behind emergency tape. Streets are quiet other than the sound of ducks on the Avon River snaking through Christchurch’s city center.

Beside the river, the 1917 statue of Robert Falcon Scott, the second man to reach the South Pole, snapped off its foundation and lay on the ground.

The ground-floor windows of Rydges Hotel on Oxford Terrace are broken while nearby bars are strewn with overturned tables and smashed glass. Farther south, verandas lining the city’s Cashel Street shopping strip have collapsed.

Police imposed a nighttime curfew in some areas of Christchurch on Wednesday because of concerns that more buildings might collapse. Members of the public within the center’s four main avenues after 6:30 p.m. New Zealand time faced arrest, police said.

The death toll from the quake, the strongest since September when the city was shaken by a 7.0-magnitude temblor, is the worst since the Napier earthquake in 1931 killed 256.

Information for this article was contributed by Phoebe Sedgman and Iain Wilson of Bloomberg News and by Kristen Gelineau of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 7 on 02/25/2011

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