Disaster law

Audio, Radio New Zealand

University of Canterbury's John Hopkins and Toni Collins explain disaster law and shortcomings in NZ's legal system highlighted by the Canterbury earthquakes.

The Pre-Panel for 16 December 2021

Audio, Radio New Zealand

Panellists Neil Miller and Zoe George discuss a breakthrough in multi-storey buildings for earthquakes with Ben Moerman, a PHD student from the University of Canterbury studying Civil Engineering.

Our Changing World - Base Isolation

Audio, Radio New Zealand

Base isolation has generally been considered an expensive system used mainly in commercial buildings to make them more earthquake resilient. Katy Gosset meets the University of Canterbury engineers who've developed a safe, low cost model that could work in our homes.

Time to remember two traumatic Christchurch events

Audio, Radio New Zealand

A frantic rewrite was required during the lockdown last year by novellist Janna Ruth, who'd set her novel Time to remember in Christchurch throughout 2020. The book's characters are mainly preoccupied by the 10th anniversary of the September 2010 Canterbury earthquake, but Janna knew she needed to include the pandemic once it took hold. But in fact she'd started working on the novel back in 2005, well before both traumatic events. Janna came to New Zealand from Germany to study geology, and she uses some of her memories from her university years in Time to remember. In it a group of university students bond and bicker, some of them still scarred by the earthquake a decade earlier.