© Marty Melville/AFP/Getty ImagesA bout that used to be on the edge of the road sits in the harbour where the land fell into the sea at the Port Wellington Container terminal caused by yesterday's earthquake on July 22, 2013.
New Zealanders ran screaming from buildings in Wellington yesterday as a magnitude 6.5 earthquake
blew out windows and caused part of the city's port to slide into the sea.The earthquake struck at 5:09 p.m. local time and was centered offshore, 57 kilometers (35 miles) south-southwest of the capital city, at a depth of 14 kilometers, according to the
U.S. Geological Survey. It was New Zealand's biggest quake since a magnitude 6.3 killed 185 people in the South Island city of Christchurch two years ago, and the strongest to hit the central region of the country since 1942, GNS Science seismologist John Ristau said.
There is an 8 percent chance of another magnitude 6 event or larger in the next 24 hours, and 20 percent over the next seven days, Ristau said in a telephone interview. "A large earthquake can increase stress or decrease stress on neighboring faults, that's what we're looking closely at," he said.
Comment: These "new efforts to increase transparency and build greater confidence" are to be seen in the stunt the US government pulled last week by shutting down its embassies in a swathe of predominantly Muslim countries, massively stepping up its bombing campaigns in several of them, and terrorising its citizens from straying beyond US borders.