CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand _ The high-rise towers that served as landmarks of this city are mostly gone. Blocks where historic brick buildings once stood are now vacant. At the city's center, Christ Church Cathedral remains in ruins.
The workday bustle in one of New Zealand's leading commercial centers, abandoned by many employers, has slowed. A once-steady stream of tourists dramatically slimmed.
Eight years ago, a huge earthquake ruptured directly under Christchurch, killing 185 people. Full recovery remains elusive.
The city offers an urgent lesson to California, whose major cities _ situated along seismic faults _ face similar threats.
A reminder of that came July 5, when the largest earthquake to hit California in two decades shook the Ridgecrest area. Had it been centered under Los Angeles, the destruction would have easily dwarfed what happened in Christchurch.
Since that magnitude 6.2 earthquake hit New Zealand on Feb. 22, 2011, the recovery has been painfully slow. The physical, economic and psychological aftershocks continue.
_ The quake redrew the geography of Christchurch. Downtown is now flatter and smaller, with 1,500 buildings in the Central Business District having been demolished. Some businesses left for the suburbs and never came back. Officials also bought and demolished 8,000 houses along rivers, the coast and in the hills and restricted those areas from future development.
_ In addition to commerce moving out of the city center, projects intended to restore Christchurch _ a convention center, a recreation center, a sports stadium _ have not been completed. Some are years away from becoming a reality.
_ Earthquake-related psychological distress has been widespread, with post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression reported years after the shaking.
"We always used to say, 'Recovery is getting back to normal life.' The thing is, after an event like this, normal life has changed, and it's never going to be the same again," said James Thompson, a regional government emergency management official. "So you recover into a new normal, or a new way of living. And that change will stay with people forever."
New Zealand and California have similar seismic safety standards, their skylines built in the 19th century with collapse-prone brick and in the 20th century with brittle concrete.
Each also sits on the edge of a huge tectonic plate boundary. Neighborhoods are built on top of soft sediment that magnifies the shaking, and seismic regulations for older buildings in many areas are inadequate to resist collapse from intense shaking.
Recovery from a huge quake in Southern California or the San Francisco Bay Area would be many times more challenging than in Christchurch, given the state's huge population, housing shortage and sprawling infrastructure. The last brush in California with a truly devastating earthquake was the magnitude 7.8 event in 1906 that destroyed much of San Francisco, setting back the Bay Area for generations.
The state's more recent quakes, while deadly, were far from worst-case scenarios.
A magnitude 6.9 earthquake in 1989 centered under the Santa Cruz Mountains, 60 miles from San Francisco, collapsed a section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and the double-decker Interstate 880, along with structures in the South of Market and Marina districts; the death toll was 63 and the property damage was $10 billion.
Southern California's magnitude 6.7 earthquake in 1994 delivered its worst shaking to relatively newer buildings in the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys. At least 57 people died and the earthquake caused $20 billion in damage and $49 billion in economic losses.
The U.S. Geological Survey has projected that a magnitude 7 earthquake on the San Francisco Bay Area's Hayward fault could lead to 800 deaths and 18,000 injuries.
A magnitude 7.8 on the San Andreas fault in Southern California could be even more catastrophic, causing 1,800 deaths and 50,000 injuries.
