A person was killed in the 2010 earthquake, but we've only just found out about it

Friday, 11 November 2022

The Deans Homestead at Homebush was severely damaged in the September 4, 2010 earthquake. Its occupants were lucky to escape serious injury.

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.

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Auckland University research fellow Shannon Abeling has published a paper updating the death toll from the 2010 Darfield earthquake.

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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.

Buildings in the central city in Christchurch sustained catastrophic damage in the September 4, 2010, earthquake but although there were narrow escapes, no-one in the central city was killed.

The death happened 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.

“As you may appreciate, looking through such a large system without a name is a bit like trying to find the needle in the haystack,” a spokeswoman said.

Members of the Hororata community in Canterbury discuss the state of the town since the the 2010 earthquake. (Video first published in September 2018)

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.

She could not give any further details about the victim due to confidentiality obligations regarding the data.

Owen Trowbridge, 16, shows the scale of the damage in Kaiapoi after the 2010 Darfield earthquake.

She said it was not unusual for earthquake records to be adjusted up or down. Other research in which she had participated showed the official records of the death toll in the Hawke’s Bay earthquake had included seven deaths that were not earthquake-related and seven that were but not recorded.

Initial death tolls were recorded by the media and it took a while for data to catch up because not every family came forward, she said. New Zealand had lower death tolls so it was easier to be accurate.

“It also matters how the people at the hospital do the reporting. It might not show up as an earthquake-caused death.”

The paper had received little exposure in New Zealand and she had not gone “out of my way” to get attention for the research.

Getting the records right was important because the information from past earthquakes was used to project potential death rates in the future. Lessons could be learned from preventable deaths, she said.

“Victims are people so you want to recognise what has happened from a human perspective.”

Otago University epidemiologist Nick Wilson, who co-authored the paper, said “in reality all earthquake deaths are under-reported”. Statistics did not pick up cardio-vascular deaths caused by the various pressures resulting from a traumatic earthquake-related event, he said.

The paper looked at fatalities directly or indirectly attributed to significant New Zealand earthquakes between 1840 and 2017 and classified them by context and cause of death.

It showed that death tolls from earthquakes were hard to get right. The toll of the Hawke’s Bay earthquake has been variously reported as 251, 255, 256, 258 and 261.

The paper identified at least 489 deaths related to 21 New Zealand earthquakes between 1840 and 2017 and a further 11 deaths from secondary causes such as relief efforts. Nearly 90% of the deaths were caused by building damage.

Mortality rates were fairly evenly distributed between males and females, the median age of death was 38 and people over 80 had the highest mortality rate.

The two most deadly New Zealand earthquakes were the Hawke’s Bay earthquake (magnitude 7.4) in and the Christchurch earthquake (magnitude 6.2) in 2011 with 256 and 185 deaths respectively.