Official: No chance of more NZ quake survivors (AP)

WELLINGTON, New Zealand – New Zealand declared the effort to find anyone else alive in the rubble of last week's massive earthquake to be over Thursday, saying no one who was trapped could have survived this long.

Families of more than 200 people listed as missing after the quake devastated the southern city of Christchurch on Feb. 22 had been holding out hope that a remarkable survival story would yet emerge. Officials say many of those listed as missing are among 161 bodies recovered but that have not yet been identified.

"We now face the reality that there is no chance that anyone could have survived this long, and efforts have to shift to the recovery of loved ones and their return to their families," Civil Defense Emergency Management national controller John Hamilton told a news conference Thursday.

"As time has gone on, the chance of finding someone alive has diminished and, sadly, there becomes a point where the response effort shifts in focus from rescue to body recovery," he said. "We have now reached that point."

Among the missing and presumed dead are dozens of foreigners, most of them students and staff of an English language school that was in an office building that collapsed completely in the disaster.

Rescuers pulled 70 people from the rubble in the first 26 hours after the quake struck just before 1 p.m. on Feb. 22, but no one has been found alive since.

Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker said New Zealanders' hearts went out to the families of those missing both locally and from overseas.

"It is a terrible day," he said. "It has been a tragic event and it has been something that none of us ever wanted or wished or even believed could happen in our city. So our thoughts, our hearts, our city, is with each and everyone of you."

Two Israeli backpackers were the first foreigners named among the dead, as the painstaking work of confirming the identities of scores of others gained pace.

The process of identifying the victims has been slowed by the extensive injuries to people who were crushed, and by the task of picking through the vast amount of rubble left behind by the magnitude 6.3 temblor.

Police Superintendent Sam Hoyle said Thursday that one more body had been found overnight, taking the overall count to 161, though just 13 have been publicly identified. Many other people remain missing, and officials have said the final death toll could be more than 200.

Hoyle said 90 of the bodies found so far were pulled from the Canterbury Television building, which housed a regional broadcaster and other offices including the language school, which taught students from Japan, China, the Philippines and other nations.

He said police and those responsible for identifying bodies had met victims families to explain why the process of was proceeding so slowly.

Superintendent Russell Gibson, another police commander involved in the recovery operation, said Thursday work had finally started at the collapsed bell tower of the Christchurch cathedral, which had to be braced before crews could enter. Up to 22 bodies may be buried in the rubble.

Other parts of the city were slowly returning to normal, though many of the 350,000 residents still have cut or limited water and power supplies and are using thousands of portable toilets deployed on street corners because of damage to the sewage system.

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NZ quake toll rises to 159 (AP)

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand – New Zealand police say the confirmed death toll from an earthquake that struck Christchurch city last week has risen to 159.

Superintendent Dave Cliff said on Wednesday that four more bodies had been pulled from the rubble from the Feb. 22 disaster, taking the total tally to 159.

Many more people are still missing and Cliff has said the final death toll is likely to be around 240.

Cliff said the remains of some victims may never be able to be retrieved because they were too badly damaged by the force of collapsing buildings.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (AP) — The jackhammers fell silent, church bells pealed and a Maori lament filled the air as New Zealand came to a standstill to mourn the estimated 240 people killed in an earthquake one week ago Tuesday.

Flags were lowered to half-staff and people gathered in groups in cities and towns to bow their heads for two minutes of silence at 12:51 p.m., the moment when the quake struck Christchurch.

The hundreds of rescue and recovery workers in the shattered city of 350,000, who have been clambering over and through the wreckage nonstop since the quake struck, took a moment to pause and turn dusty faces to the sky or the ground. Friends and neighbors hugged each other. Traffic halted in the streets.

"I was born here, I've lived here all my life and I'll die here. It's my home and it hurts so much to see it in this way," said Mike Cochrane, fighting back tears.

Cochrane had climbed out of his car at one of the city's busiest intersections to sit under a tree on a traffic island to observe the commemoration, climbing back in and driving off when a second peal of bells signaled the moment of silence was over.

Nearby, Rosie MacLean had left her realtor's office to stand in the street, a spontaneous act matched by thousands of others who also preferred to be outside.

"I suppose this is about hope, really, to realize we've got a future somewhere, but that's just hard to find at the moment," she said. "I guess this means we've reached a point where we can all acknowledge it together, which is a beautiful thing."

Prime Minister John Key had asked the nation's 4.5 million people to join in a show of unity for people "enduring tragedy beyond what most of us can imagine." And they did.

In the capital, Wellington, a traditional Maori lament rang out over the Parliament building.

Police said Tuesday they have pulled 155 bodies from the wreckage, and said the number of others missing and feared dead indicated a final death toll higher than previously thought.

"The figure ... of around 240 is solidifying," Superintendent Dave Cliff told reporters.

The magnitude 6.3 quake struck within a few miles (kilometers) of downtown Christchurch, when the southern city was bustling with workers, shoppers and tourists going about their activities. It brought down or badly damaged office towers, churches and thousands of homes across the city.

Key said a commission of inquiry would investigate the circumstances of the quake, including a detailed look at why the two worst-hit offices, where more than 100 people died — the Canterbury Television and Pyne Gould Guinness buildings — collapsed.

"We need to get answers about why those buildings failed, if there was something unique about them," Key told Australian Broadcasting Corp. television.

He noted that both were built before substantial changes were made to New Zealand's building code in 1976.

The owners of the CTV building — where an unknown number of language school students from Japan, China and other countries are among the suspected 120 bodies entombed — said in a statement issued by their lawyers they would cooperate fully with the inquiry.

Lawyer Ken Jones said the owners had commissioned a detailed structural engineers report after an earlier quake on Sept. 4, and that the report found superficial damage to the building from that temblor but raised no structural issues.

More than 900 international urban disaster specialists and hundreds more local officials have been picking through the wreckage. No one has been pulled out alive since the day after the quake, and officials say it is almost certain no one else will be.

The government on Tuesday extended a state of emergency that gives national authorities greater powers to deal with the disaster. Authorities are still working to restore full power and waters supplies to the city, and many streets are lined with silt pushed up from the earth by the quake.

In one quirk amid the destruction, Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker said a handwritten parchment and a sealed copper cylinder believed to be a time capsule were found hidden inside a 19th century statue of the city's founder that toppled in the disaster. They appeared to contain a message from the city's founders expressing their vision for it.

"It seems almost providential that they have come to light now to provide the inspiration we need in this most difficult time," Parker said.

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Associated Press writer Ray Lilley in Wellington, New Zealand, contributed to this report.

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Weaker New Zealand quake packed a deadlier punch (AP)

LOS ANGELES – The latest New Zealand earthquake was a deadly combination of distance, depth and timing.
While weaker than the one that rocked the area last September, it did more damage and cost lives, primarily because of its location.
Tuesday's magnitude-6.3 quake was centered about 3 miles from the populated hub of Christchurch, toppling buildings, killing dozens and trapping others. It was also only about 3 miles deep and occurred during the middle of a workday when commercial buildings were filled with employees.
The jolt "is squarely beneath the city itself," said seismologist Egill Hauksson of the California Institute of Technology. "All the old historic buildings are being shaken more violently than they were built to withstand."
Scientists classified it as an aftershock of the powerful magnitude-7 that struck last Sept. 4.
No one died in that early morning quake — which was 11 times stronger — mainly because it was centered farther away, about 30 miles west of the city center. It was also twice as deep as Tuesday's aftershock. Shallower quakes tend to be more damaging.
While New Zealand has strict building codes, Christchurch has a number of pre-World War II buildings that were badly damaged by the September quake, which also triggered landslides in the area.
Another reason why this latest quake was more deadly is because buildings that were previously weakened by ground shaking were more likely to suffer damage or even collapse this time around, said Tom Jordan, who heads the Southern California Earthquake Center.
Many cities on the U.S. West Coast face similar seismic risks, experts say.
The West Coast has similar soil as New Zealand, which can turn to mush during an earthquake and worsen damage done by shaking, said Robert Yeats, professor emeritus of geology at Oregon State University.
"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," Yeats said in a statement.
Since September, about half a dozen aftershocks greater than magnitude-5 have rattled Christchurch. Tuesday's was the largest aftershock to date.
"You can have an aftershock months after the main shock," said geophysicist Paul Earle of the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo. "Just because a few months have gone by doesn't mean you can't have a large, damaging earthquake."
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Online:
U.S. Geological Survey: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/
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Foreign rescue teams join search for NZ quake survivors (Reuters)

CHRISTCHURCH (Reuters) – Hundreds of foreign rescuers will join exhausted New Zealand teams on Thursday in an increasingly desperate search of quake-shattered buildings in central Christchurch as time runs out to find survivors buried under rubble.

Officials have abandoned hope of finding anyone alive in the collapsed Canterbury Television (CTV) building in the city center, including foreign students at a third-floor language school, with a grader moving in to clear debris.

Police warned about the possible collapse of a 26-story hotel unleashing a "domino" effect on surrounding building.

Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker said the quake-prone city now faced hard decisions on rebuilding its heart.

"We are not going to walk away from this place," Parker told New Zealand television. "We may have to level entire blocks in some places."

The Director of New Zealand's Ministry of Civil Defense and Emergency Management, John Hamilton, has said rescue teams have a window of only two or three days to find people after Tuesday's 6.3-magnitude earthquake.

Seventy-five people have been confirmed dead, but that toll was expected to rise with more than 300 people missing in the country's second-biggest city. Up to 100 of those were thought to be in the CTV building, police said.

Much of the city remained without power and water, and hundreds of people queued for water supplies brought in.

It was New Zealand's most deadly natural disaster for 80 years, and one estimate said the damage could cost $12 billion.

To avoid more deaths and curb crime, police and the military placed an overnight curfew on the central business district, with soldiers patrolling in armored personnel carriers as aftershocks rattled the unstable center.

Authorities also placed an exclusion zone around the hotel, which teetered near collapse, threatening nearby buildings.

"If the Hotel Grand Chancellor falls, and three engineers say it is a significant risk, that will be dramatic, a domino effect in the central city of other unstable buildings. It will be a major disaster," said police Superintendent Dave Cliff.

Rescue teams had to perform amputations to free some of the 120 survivors pulled from the wreckage of the tremor, which was the second strong quake to hit the historic tourist city in five months.

But there were moments of elation. A woman, Ann Bodkin, was rescued from a destroyed finance company building after a day trapped under a desk.

Cliff said as many as 100 bodies could be under the television building, while scores more could lie beneath the city's shattered cathedral and other nearby buildings.

A national state of emergency has been declared. It is the country's worst natural disaster since a 1931 quake in the North Island city of Napier which killed 256.

Christchurch Hospital received an influx of injured residents, with broken limbs, crush injuries and lacerations.

Thousands of people were facing a second night in emergency shelters in local schools, community halls and at a racecourse. Pope Benedict sent a message of support for survivors and rescuers from the Vatican.

"My thoughts turn especially to the people there who are being severely tested by this tragedy," he said. "I also ask you to join me in praying for all who have lost their lives."

Rescuers from the United States, Britain, Taiwan and Japan arrive in New Zealand on Thursday, with the first of 148 Australian specialists already on the streets.

ECONOMIC IMPACT

Indications of the big economic impact of the quake are starting to emerge. J.P. Morgan estimated insured losses could be $12 billion, according to a source who had seen a research note.

When asked about possible costs, Prime minister John Key told reporters: "No one's in a position to actually assess that." He said he hoped Christchurch could still host rugby World Cup matches later this year as planned.

Key said the country could afford to rebuild Christchurch, but reinsurance risk would probably worsen.

Catastrophe modeling firm AIR Worldwide Estimates said the insurance industry faces damage claims of between NZ$5 billion ($3.5 billion) and NZ$11.5 billion ($8 billion).

Reinsurers Munich Re, Swiss Re and Hannover Re, who help insurers cover big losses, took many weeks to provide damage estimates from the September quake due to complexities of assessing structural damage to buildings.

The disaster fueled talk that the central bank might cut interest rates in coming weeks to shore up confidence in the already-fragile national economy, but the bank did not mention monetary policy on Wednesday when it commented on the quake.

Seeing the quake as a further blow to the economy, Standard Chartered bank is revising down its 2011 GDP growth forecast for New Zealand to 1.4 percent and 2.7 percent for 2012 -- from 2.0 percent and 3.0 percent respectively, because of a double-dip in the housing market, tightening budget and sluggish local demand. ($1 = 1.339 New Zealand dollars)

(Writing by Rob Taylor; Editing by Ed Davies and Sugita Katyal)

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New Zealand quake kills at least 65 (Reuters)

WELLINGTON (Reuters) – A strong earthquake killed at least 65 people in New Zealand's second-biggest city of Christchurch on Tuesday, with more casualties expected as rescuers worked into the night to find scores of people trapped inside collapsed buildings.

It was the second quake to hit the city of almost 400,000 people in five months, and New Zealand's most deadly natural disaster for 80 years.

"We may well be witnessing New Zealand's darkest day...The death toll I have at the moment is 65 and that may rise," New Zealand Prime Minister John Key told local TV.

"It's hard to describe. What was a vibrant city a few hours ago has been brought to its knees," added Key, who had flown to his home town of Christchurch, where he still has family.

The 6.3 magnitude quake struck at lunchtime, when streets and shops thronged with people and offices were still occupied.

Christchurch's mayor described the city, a historic tourist town popular with overseas students, as a war zone.

"There will be deaths, there will be a lot of injuries, there will be a lot of heartbreak in this city," Mayor Bob Parker told Australian TV by phone.

He told local radio that up to 200 could be trapped in buildings but later revised down to around 100 or so.

The quake is the country's worst natural disaster since a 1931 quake in the North Island city of Napier which killed 256.

Christchurch Hospital saw an influx of injured residents.

"They are largely crushes and cuts types of injuries and chest pain as well," said David Meates, head of the Canterbury Health Board. Some of the more seriously injured could be evacuated to other cities, he added.

TRAPPED

All army medical staff have been mobilized, while several hundred troops were helping with the rescue, officials said.

A woman trapped in one of the buildings said she was terrified and waiting for rescuers to reach her six hours after the quake, which was followed by at least 20 aftershocks.

"I thought the best place was under the desk but the ceiling collapsed on top, I can't move and I'm just terrified," office worker Anne Voss told TV3 news by mobile phone.

Christchurch has been described as a little piece of England. It has an iconic cathedral, now largely destroyed, and a river called the Avon. It had many historic stone buildings, and is popular with English-language students and also with tourists as a springboard for tours of the scenic South Island.

Twelve Japanese students at a school in Christchurch were still missing after a building collapse, an official told Reuters in Japan. Nine Japanese students and two teachers from the same group had already been rescued or accounted for.

Emergency shelters had also been set up in local schools and at a race course, as night approached. Helicopters dumped water to try to douse a fire in one tall office building. A crane helped rescue workers trapped in another office block.

"I was in the square right outside the cathedral -- the whole front has fallen down and there were people running from there. There were people inside as well," said John Gurr, a camera technician who was in the city center when the quake hit.

"A lady grabbed hold of me to stop falling over...We just got blown apart. Colombo Street, the main street, is just a mess...There's lots of water everywhere, pouring out of the ground," he said.

Emergency crews picked through rubble under bright lights as night fell, including a multi-storey office building whose floors appeared to have pancaked on top of each other.

SILT, SAND AND GRAVEL

Christchurch is built on silt, sand and gravel, with a water table beneath. In an earthquake, the water rises, mixing with the sand and turning the ground into a swamp and swallowing up sections of road and entire cars.

TV footage showed sections of road that had collapsed into a milky, sand-colored lake right beneath the surface. One witness described the footpaths as like "walking on sand."

Unlike last year's even stronger tremor, which struck early in the morning when streets were virtually empty, people were walking or driving along streets when the shallow tremor struck, sending awnings and the entire faces of buildings crashing down.

Police said debris had rained down on two buses, crushing them, but there was no word on any casualties.

The quake hit at 12:51 pm (2351 GMT Monday) at a depth of only 4 km (2.5 miles), according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

TALK OF POST-QUAKE RATE CUT

The quake helped knock the New Zealand dollar down to $0.75, about 1.8 percent off late U.S. levels, on fears the damage could dent confidence in the already fragile economy.

Westpac Bank also raised the possibility that the central bank could cut interest rates over the next few weeks to shore up confidence after the quake, while other banks pushed out their expectations for the next rate hike. ANZ now expects the central bank to be on hold until the first quarter of 2012.

Shares in Australian banks and insurers, which typically have large operations in New Zealand, fell after the quake.

The tremor was centered about 10 km (six miles) southwest of Christchurch, which had suffered widespread damage during last September's 7.1 magnitude quake but no deaths.

New Zealand sits between the Pacific and Indo-Australian tectonic plates and records on average more than 14,000 earthquakes a year, of which about 20 would normally top magnitude 5.0.

(Additional reporting by Bruce Hextall, Michael Smith and Cecile Lefort in Sydney; Saika Takano in Tokyo; Writing by Mark Bendeich and Ed Davies; Editing by Daniel Magnowski)

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