Once crushed, a modern three-bedroomed home weighs about 15 tonnes and amounts to about five truck-loads.
This matter-of-fact information was passed on to the Otago Daily Times this week by Christchurch digger driver Craig Bugden.
In the past year, Bugden has knocked down and crushed about 100 houses, at the rate of three a week on average, and has sent off hundreds of truckloads to the Burwood landfill.
Burial costs $220 per tonne.
Bugden, whose own house escaped the worst of the Christchurch earthquakes, is clearing a subdivision built alongside an estuary in Bexley about eight or 10 years ago.
He is in Seabreeze Tce, working his way towards Wetlands Grove.
These are "new" houses of modern materials - concrete slab, brick walls, plasterboard, aluminium window frames, and with roofs of long-run roofing iron or concrete tiles.
Salvage crews have already been through, stripping out plumbing and kitchen fittings and anything else that could be recycled.
But the house next to where Bugden is explaining the demolition process still has doors. He explains that's because the doors are worthless - swollen and bent from being submerged in the silt and water of liquefaction.
The same goes for the carpet.
Long-run roofing can be salvaged, but there is no market for concrete roof tiles because no-one in Christchurch now wants a roof made of concrete.
As for the bricks, they are of modern design and have mortar inside them, making them unsalvageable.
And the framing timber is too hard to get at. Christchurch has a smoke-free regime, so it cannot even be used for firewood.
In the end, there is little of value in a modern house wrecked by earthquake.
"So it just gets smashed up," Bugden says.
His digger has a bucket and an extra "thumb" to help hold and break awkward pieces of house.
He pulls at the roof and collapses the building on to its concrete slab. Then he shovels it on to a truck.
And when he moves on to the next house, he leaves nothing but a patch of fine grey silt.
But she is not still there by choice. Her house, which sank about a metre, is damaged beyond repair and a brand-new house has been waiting for her in another part of Christchurch since December.
She has already moved her plants but cannot move her furniture and herself there because she is waiting for the Christchurch City Council to "sign off" the new subdivision.
Inexplicably, the subdivision where her new house stands is still awaiting resource consent.
She complains about the Christchurch City Council.
"The council are, just excuse the expression, f... ing around and we can't get the paperwork through."
She considers the council is too busy with "in-fighting" and power struggles and has forgotten about "the real things that need to be done".
"We all need houses to live in. We all have to be out of here in a few months, so that's what their priority should be."
Hale-Fielding exudes a real sense of resilience in the face of turmoil.
She cheerfully recounts her reaction to the third big quake, in December, that would require her and her neighbours to again launch into a major clean-up.
As police, fire and council vehicles rolled into the suburb, a small group of earthquake victims parked their chairs on the front lawn, had a few drinks and got "plastered".
Emergency services, she says, considered their response not unreasonable.
Although the stories have been told innumerable times in newspapers and on television, there is still no more riveting account of the experience of going through a major earthquake than to sit across the kitchen table from someone who was there.
Hale-Fielding: "The first in September was terrific because you didn't know what had happened - that 4.30am one.
"We were all asleep in bed and, honestly, when I woke up I thought a train was coming through.
"You don't know where you are. You just don't know what's happened. And you just go into shock and you are running around and you get outside.
"There was just water spewing through the pipes in the road. There were sewers spewing everywhere.
"It was pitch black. People were screaming.
"Liquefaction was ankle- or knee-deep. You were wading through it.
"And you really thought you had gone off into another world and you were in a war.
"And then people were screaming that a tsunami was coming, so we all just piled into our cars and it was like bumper-to-bumper.
"The roads were broken. There were holes everywhere. The cars were nose-diving down into the holes. Yeah, it was pretty horrific ...
"You try not to think about it actually because that particular night was just a nightmare ... the fear everyone went through that night in the pitch black with the water, the roads, the holes just opening up in front of you.
"It was just absolute fear."
Fifteen months on, Hale-Fielding has a range of reactions to aftershocks.
Some she tries to ignore but for the "really bad ones" she curls up in a ball on the floor, next to a wall.
Hale-Fielding was driving near the CBD when the February 22 earthquake struck, killing 184 people.
She saw the "roads rolling" and the cars being "chucked every which way" and she saw the dust cloud rise above the city.
A year on, on a bus trip through the cordoned-off part of the CBD, the media are invited to photograph and describe what it is like.
Some facts are provided - a building here is to be repaired, a building there is to be demolished, an empty section here is where victims of the earthquake died.
But it is simply impossible to reduce to a few paragraphs the devastation the earthquake has wrought on the heart of Christchurch and the desolation it has brought.
My old office, of concrete and tinted glass, of humming air-conditioning, cheerful banter, computer screens and cold beers on a Friday, is gone.
More than 1000 such buildings ... some older, some newer, some bigger ... are to go.
Even the sturdiest-looking of those still standing, the BNZ building towering over the Square, is on the demolition list.
Warwick Isaacs, general manager, demolitions for the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority [Cera], formerly of Dunedin, is one of those deciding which buildings will stay and which must go.
With a "crew of engineers" he examines the plans of individual buildings, the damage that is evident, discusses the situation with the owner and insurers and then "forms a view" on the building's future.
Isaacs says the pressures on his crew have changed as the city has "got further from the event".
"In the first six to eight months, owners were really trying hard to save their buildings and with the progressive aftershocks ... they've come to the realisation actually it's better to move on."
New buildings, he says, will be easier to tenant because they will match the new building code and will be stronger.
It is difficult to judge the speed of progress in the CBD.
There are high-rise buildings standing in isolation, surrounded by gravel.
There are historic frontages propped up with steel and shipping containers.
There are diggers and trucks where once there were cars and shoppers.
Cera chief executive Roger Sutton acknowledges the perception of slow progress with that one inescapable fact.
"There are a thousand buildings that have to come down here. It is going to take a long time. And it's going to take longer to rebuild them.
"But, having said that, the Christchurch economy is still going. The Canterbury economy is going gangbusters. All the indicators are really, really positive."
Much of the CBD business is still about demolition, and the preservation of historic frontages "unzipped" from their crumbling interiors.
But new foundations are also being laid in places.
At a workshop being held next door to the almost ruined Knox Church - now a roof with no walls - foundations and piles are the main talking point.
The workshop has been organised by landscape architect Di Lucas, formerly of Dunedin, to foster discussion between structural engineers, geotech experts, architects and builders.
Lucas says she wanted innovative ideas considered in the rebuild of Christchurch.
In her part of Christchurch, Peterborough Village, the owners of a cafe destroyed by the earthquake were quoted $300,000 for traditional-style foundations on which to rebuild a two-storey, 200sq m building.
Such a cost made the building uneconomic.
Amid the technical talk there are ideas about lightweight foundations, floors that are "self-levelling" and buildings that are more symmetrical, spreading the load more evenly across the ground.
An organisation called AMO reveals the "affordable, safe and rapidly erectable structure" it plans to locate in Colombo St [see illustration].
The six-storey modular office block will be built in Thailand and Japan and shipped to Christchurch.
Lucas says a lot of such radical ideas are "ready to go", "... but it's getting people to be aware".
"The structural engineers and geotech engineers need to know about these other systems. We don't want them just recommending and requiring traditional stuff.
"This is a learning exercise for everybody."
Christchurch Central City Business Association manager Paul Lonsdale sees the rebuild as an opportunity.
"Christchurch was heading in a very bad direction. Aside from the tragedy, this has delivered us a great opportunity."
He refers to "dead space" in buildings not designed for modern purposes and gives as an example an empty building from which 562 office staff were evacuated but then "green stickered", allowing it to be reoccupied.
"They left, because in actual fact it wasn't working for them.
"They had ... too many staff spread over too many floors.
"They wanted a couple of simple floors where they could make their team operate better.
"So long-term, central city was heading in a very bad direction."
Lonsdale operates out of a shipping container in the Cashel St mall alongside a bank in a container and near a grocery store also in a container.
He believes that as the new Christchurch CBD emerges, the city's old failings can be dealt with- particularly access and parking.
"Even though we are the second-biggest city in New Zealand, we are a large rural town with rural thinking.
"When farmers come to town, they drive. They are not going to get on the bus."
And that, he suggests, means following suburban shopping centres by providing very large car parks and also improving the one-way street system to give motorists better access.
"If you don't have parking and access, people won't come."
He is encouraged that 67% of businesses have indicated they want to return to the CBD.
"That's a good start. And if we do the rebuild right, we'll get the rest - they will come."
Lonsdale expects the quake will lead to an influx of younger people that will help reverse the trend towards Christchurch becoming a "retirement village".
Roger Sutton agrees.
"Christchurch in five years will be booming.
"There are 15, 20, 25,000 extra [construction] workers who are going to come here, plus the hairdressers, plus the tattooists plus the barmen who are going to look after them.
"I think we are going to get a much brighter, more interesting CBD than we had before.
"But it's also going to be done on the back of a community that has been through a lot, that's really resilient, where we know neighbours and friends much more intimately than we did before."
