#2103 ... Rockin' Roll

Heading home at 3.00pm on Friday ... the streets are full of people and cars. Took me two hours to get home ... normally 20 minutes. A magnitude 6.6 earthquake struck Wellington at 2:31pm this afternoon. Today's 6.6-magnitude earthquake was the same kind of quake as last month's 6.5 event and was not what would usually be expected, GNS Science says. The two were termed a doublet.GNS Science duty seismologist Caroline Little said it was somewhat unusual to have had the 6.6 quake today as the odds had been against an earthquake of that size - but it had still been a possibility. In the 3.5 hours after today's 6.6 quake there were at least 77 aftershocks, of which 11 were above magnitude 5. "This is just the stresses in the crust realigning back to an equilibrium," she said. The initial 5.7 quake on July 19 had changed the stresses the Marlborough fault region was under. The 5.7 had been on a different fault from the subsequent quakes. It had been deeper and the fault had moved differently. In the 24 hours from 5.30pm it had been calculated there would be an average of 31 quakes between magnitude 4 and 4.9, based on previous earthquakes in this country and around the world. Between zero and seven quakes of magnitude 5 to 5.9 had been expected, while from zero to two quakes of magnitude 6 or greater had been expected, and one had struck.