Extent of shaking, Īnangahua earthquake, 24 May 1968

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Level Four:

Generally noticed indoors as a jolt, or similar to vibration from heavy traffic; glassware and crockery rattle; liquids slightly disturbed; buildings may creak.
Level Five:

Generally felt indoors and outside; most sleepers wakened and a few people alarmed; small objects displaced and broken; a few windows cracked.
Level Six:

Felt by all; people and animals alarmed; difficulty in walking steadily; objects fall from shelves; unstable furniture tipped over; slight damage to some masonry buildings and weak chimneys damaged.
Level Seven:

General alarm; difficulty standing; car drivers may stop; unreprced stone and brick walls cracked, and some buildings damaged; unrestrained water cylinders may move and burst; small rockfalls and landslides.
Level Eight:

Alarm may approach panic; cars hard to steer; some buildings damaged, and weaker ones may collapse; small to moderate landslides; water generally disturbed.
Level Nine:

Many buildings damaged and some collapse; unsecured houses move off foundations; brick veneers collapse; widespread cracking and landsliding.
Level Ten:

Widespread damage to buildings; many collapse or are partly destroyed; landsliding very widespread in steep terrain; severe liquefaction in soft ground.

Roll over isoseismal lines for information

The Modified Mercalli scale (from 1 to 12) measures earthquakes by the intensity of shaking observed. This map shows the extent of shaking from the Īnangahua earthquake of 24 May 1968. From an intensity of 8 at the epicentre near Īnangahua Junction, 40 kilometres east of Westport, the isoseismal lines spread outwards. Although the most damaging shaking was on the northern part of the West Coast, the earthquake was felt over much of New Zealand.

Using this item

Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Source: G. L. Downes, Atlas of isoseismal maps of New Zealand earthquakes. Lower Hutt: Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences, 1995.

This item has been provided for private study purposes (such as school projects, family and local history research) and any published reproduction (print or electronic) may infringe copyright law. It is the responsibility of the user of any material to obtain clearance from the copyright holder.

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Comments

Irene Callaghan
03 December 2022

I was a 13year old living in Westport at the time the earthquake happened and I remember hearing a noise like a large train thundering towards me from the direction of the hills. I was thrown to the floor and rolled under the wire wove bed. Our house was attached to the bakery and my father had to fight his way in the darkness past the large racks of cooling bread that were rolling across the bakehouse floor to get to our bedrooms. I was very glad to see the torch coming down the passage towards us. Everything on the East wall of the room was tipped over and a radio on a shelf on a South wall was still sitting there. I have memories of collecting rainwater in buckets under broken spouting and helping clean kitchen floors once the chimney was removed and it was safe. The preserves always seemed to be kept in top cupboards and beetroot mixed with broken glass made such a lovely mess. Television had just arrived in Westport and TV sets had fallen through broken shop front windows and were laying on the footpath of the main street. I remember watching out my bedroom window about one week after the main quake, and watching the waves in the lawn during a large aftershock until my mother draged me away from the window.

Bill Lees
30 November 2010

It was not the actual shaking, but the pronounced and persistent rattling of my neighbour's metal gate six metres from my bedroom window that awakened me suddenly in Wellington's western suburbs before dawn on May 24th, 1968. Surface waves originating from the 7.1 mag. Inangahua earthquake 180 kilometres west-southwest of my timber-frame home in Karori had started to propagate through the clay soil its concrete piles were embedded in. However, although the jolting motion I felt was pronounced, it was not violent, and I would rate it at MM 5. I seem to recall hearing the startled cry of a bird in the trees at the back of the property that, like me, had been awakened abruptly by the very sudden onset of the earthquake. I also remember hearing a kind of soft rumbling coming from deep inside the earth during this event. The most memorable thing about the shock for me was its duration, which I estimate to have been around 40 seconds. The whole experience is something I will never forget.

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Story: Historic earthquakes