# Christchurch Earthquake - UC Student Volunteer Army



## Dene (Mar 3, 2011)

Hey guys,

So as most of you should be aware, we had a rather large earthquake in Christchurch on Tuesday the 22nd of February at 12:51 pm. This has destroyed half of the central business district of the city, has claimed at least 200 lives, and has forced many people to leave the city.

Another thing that the earthquake has done is to bring up a lot of silt out of the earth. I won't go into the details, but this is known as liquefaction. Basically, water mixes with silt under the surface, and then is forced up through cracks. This gets absolutely _everywhere_. I have seen backyards over 2 feet deep in silt. It gets into houses and all over the roads. 

Seeing as the university is closed anyway, the students help out by going around to the worst affected areas and help dig the silt out of peoples houses and yards. This is a video showing roughly what we have been doing:






Why am I telling you this? Well, obviously this whole process is run through a facebook page. At the moment we are just short of 25,000 "likes". What I ask you to do is quickly visit the page here, and simply "like" it! Every like counts.

Cheers guys.


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## pjk (Mar 3, 2011)

Awesome. Glad to see students helping out. I've liked that page. Do you know of anyway we (in the US) can help? Have a page to donate to?


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## Lumej (Mar 3, 2011)

@pjk: Here.
It looks like an amazing project.


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## ianography (Mar 3, 2011)

I think it's great what you're doing.


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## Dene (Mar 4, 2011)

Yea there are tons of places to donate to.

We got 25000


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