Damage to ceiling systems resulted in a substantial financial loss to building owners in the Canterbury earthquakes. In some buildings, collapse of ceilings could easily have resulted in severe injury to occupants. This paper summarizes the types of ceiling damage observed in the Canterbury earthquakes, and draws useful lessons from the observed performance of different types of ceiling systems. Existing ceiling manufacturing and installing practices/regulations in New Zealand are critically scrutinized to identify deficiencies, and measures are suggested to improve the practice so that the damage to ceilings and the resulting loss are minimized in future earthquakes.
The timeliness and quality of recovery activities are impacted by the organisation and human resourcing of the physical works. This research addresses the suitability of different resourcing strategies on post-disaster demolition and debris management programmes. This qualitative analysis primarily draws on five international case studies including 2010 Canterbury earthquake, 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, 2009 Samoan Tsunami, 2009 Victorian Bushfires and 2005 Hurricane Katrina. The implementation strategies are divided into two categories: collectively and individually facilitated works. The impacts of the implementation strategies chosen are assessed for all disaster waste management activities including demolition, waste collection, transportation, treatment and waste disposal. The impacts assessed include: timeliness, completeness of projects; and environmental, economic and social impacts. Generally, the case studies demonstrate that detritus waste removal and debris from major repair work is managed at an individual property level. Debris collection, demolition and disposal are generally and most effectively carried out as a collective activity. However, implementation strategies are affected by contextual factors (such as funding and legal constraints) and the nature of the disaster waste (degree of hazardous waste, geographical spread of waste etc.) and need to be designed accordingly. Community involvement in recovery activities such as demolition and debris removal is shown to contribute positively to psychosocial recovery.
The Canterbury earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 caused significant damage and disruption to the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. A Royal Commission was established to report on the causes of building failure as a result of the earthquakes as well as look at the legal and best-practice requirements for buildings in New Zealand Central Business Districts. The Royal Commission made 189 recommendations on a variety of matters including managing damaged buildings after an earthquake, the adequacy of building codes and standards, and the processes of seismic assessments of existing buildings to determine their earthquake vulnerability. In response the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, the agency responsible for administering building regulation in New Zealand, established a work programme to assist with the Canterbury rebuild and to implement the lessons learned throughout New Zealand. The five primary work streams in the programme are: • Facilitating the Canterbury Rebuild • Structural Performance and Design Standards • Geotechnical and structural guidance • Existing Building Resilience • Post Disaster Building Management This paper provides more detail on each of the work streams. There has been significant collaboration between the New Zealand Government and the research community, technical societies, and engineering consultants, both within New Zealand and internationally, to deliver the programme and improve the resilience of the New Zealand built environment. This has presented major challenges for an extremely busy industry in the aftermath of the Canterbury earthquakes. The paper identifies the items of work that have been completed and the work that is still in progress at the time of writing.
Designing a structure for higher- than-code seismic performance can result in significant economic and environmental benefits. This higher performance can be achieved using the principles of Performance-Based Design, in which engineers design structures to minimize the probabilistic lifecycle seismic impacts on a building. Although the concept of Performance-Based Design is not particularly new, the initial capital costs associated with designing structures for higher performance have historically hindered the widespread adoption of performance-based design practices. To overcome this roadblock, this research is focused on providing policy makers and stakeholders with evidence-based environmental incentives for designing structures in New Zealand for higher seismic performance. In the first phase of the research, the environmental impacts of demolitions in Christchurch following the Canterbury Earthquakes were quantified to demonstrate the environmental consequences of demolitions following seismic events. That is the focus here. A building data set consisting of 142 concrete buildings that were demolished following the earthquake was used to quantify the environmental impacts of the demolitions in terms of the embodied carbon and energy in the building materials. A reduced set of buildings was used to develop a material takeoff model to estimate material quantities in the entire building set, and a lifecycle assessment tool was used to calculate the embodied carbon and energy in the materials. The results revealed staggering impacts in terms of the embodied carbon and energy in the materials in the demolished buildings. Ongoing work is focused developing an environmental impact framework that incorporates all the complex factors (e.g. construction methodologies, repair methodologies (if applicable), demolition methodologies (if applicable), and waste management) that contribute to the environmental impacts of building repair and demolition following earthquakes.
