The University of Canterbury is known internationally for the Origins of New Zealand English (ONZE) corpus (see Gordon et al 2004). ONZE is a large collection of recordings from people born between 1851 and 1984, and it has been widely utilised for linguistic and sociolinguistic research on New Zealand English. The ONZE data is varied. The recordings from the Mobile Unit (MU) are interviews and were collected by members of the NZ Broadcasting service shortly after the Second World War, with the aim of recording stories from New Zealanders outside the main city centres. These were supplemented by interview recordings carried out mainly in the 1990s and now contained in the Intermediate Archive (IA). The final ONZE collection, the Canterbury Corpus, is a set of interviews and word-list recordings carried out by students at the University of Canterbury. Across the ONZE corpora, there are different interviewers, different interview styles and a myriad of different topics discussed. In this paper, we introduce a new corpus – the QuakeBox – where these contexts are much more consistent and comparable across speakers. The QuakeBox is a corpus which consists largely of audio and video recordings of monologues about the 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquakes. As such, it represents Canterbury speakers’ very recent ‘danger of death’ experiences (see Labov 2013). In this paper, we outline the creation and structure of the corpus, including the practical issues involved in storing the data and gaining speakers’ informed consent for their audio and video data to be included.
A significant portion of economic loss from the Canterbury Earthquake sequence in 2010-2011 was attributed to losses to residential buildings. These accounted for approximately $12B of a total $40B economic losses (Horspool, 2016). While a significant amount of research effort has since been aimed at research in the commercial sector, little has been done to reduce the vulnerability of the residential building stock.
This is a joint Resilience Framework undertaken by the Electrical, Computer and Software Engineering Department of the University of Auckland in association with West Power and Orion networks and partially funded by the New Zealand National Science Challenge and QuakeCoRE. The Energy- Communication research group nearly accomplished two different researches focusing on both asset resilience and system resilience. Asset resilience research which covers underground cables system in Christchurch region is entitled “2010-2011 Canterbury Earthquake Sequence Impact on 11KV Underground Cables” and system resilience research which covers electricity distribution and communication system in West Coast region is entitled “NZ Electricity Distribution Network Resilience Assessment and Restoration Models following Major Natural Disturbance“. As the fourth milestone of the aforementioned research project, the latest outcome of both projects has been socialised with the stakeholders during the Cigre NZ 2019 Forum.
In the wake of the Canterbury earthquakes, one of the biggest threats to our heritage buildings is the risk of earthquakes and the associated drive to strengthen or demolish buildings. Can Small Town NZ balance the requirements of the EQPB legislation and economic realities of their places? The government’s priority is on safety of building occupants and citizens in the streets. However, maintaining and strengthening privately-owned heritage buildings is often cost prohibitive. Hence, heritage regulation has frequently been perceived as interfering with private property rights, especially when heritage buildings occupy a special place in the community becoming an important place for people (i.e. public benefits are larger than private). We investigate several case studies where building owners have been given green light to demolish heritage listed buildings to make way for modern developments. In two of the case studies developers provided evidence of unaffordable strengthening costs. A new trend that has emerged is a voluntary offer of contributing to an incentive fund to assist with heritage preservation of other buildings. This is a unique example where private owners offer incentives (via council controlled organisations) instead of it being purely the domain of the central or local governments.
The level of destruction from the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes led to changes in the New Zealand seismic building code. The destruction showed that the NZ building codes did not fully performed to expectation and needed Improvement to ensure that impact of future earthquakes would be minimised. The building codes have been amended to improve buildings resilience to earthquake and other related extreme loading conditions. Rebuilding Christchurch with the new modifications in the seismic building code comes with its own unique challenges to the entire system. This project investigates the impact of rebuilding Christchurch with the new seismic Building codes in terms of how the new changes affected the building industry and the management of construction.
After the Christchurch earthquakes, the government declared about 8000 houses as Red Zoned, prohibiting further developments in these properties, and offering the owners to buy them out. The government provided two options for owners: the first was full payment for both land and dwelling at the 2007 property evaluation, the second was payment for land, and the rest to be paid by the owner’s insurance. Most people chose the second option. Using data from LINZ combined with data from StatNZ, this project empirically investigates what led people to choose this second option, and what were the implications of these choices for the owners’ wealth and income.
On 15 August 1868, a great earthquake struck off the coast of the Chile-Peru border generating a tsunami that travelled across the Pacific. Wharekauri-Rekohu-Chatham Islands, located 800 km east of Christchurch, Aotearoa-New Zealand (A-NZ) was one of the worst affected locations in A-NZ. Tsunami waves, including three over 6 metres high, injured and killed people, destroyed buildings and infrastructure, and impacted the environment, economy and communities. While experience of disasters, and advancements in disaster risk reduction systems and technology have all significantly advanced A-NZ’s capacity to be ready for and respond to future earthquakes and tsunami, social memory of this event and other tsunamis during our history has diminished. In 2018, a team of scientists, emergency managers and communication specialists collaborated to organise a memorial event on the Chatham Islands and co-ordinate a multi-agency media campaign to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the 1868 Arica tsunami. The purpose was to raise awareness of the disaster and to encourage preparedness for future tsunami. Press releases and science stories were distributed widely by different media outlets and many attended the memorial event indicating public interest for commemorating historical disasters. We highlight the importance of commemorating disaster anniversaries through memorial events, to raise awareness of historical disasters and increase community preparedness for future events – “lest we forget and let us learn.”
The Canterbury earthquake sequence (2010-2011) was the most devastating catastrophe in New Zealand‘s modern history. Fortunately, in 2011 New Zealand had a high insurance penetration ratio, with more than 95% of residences being insured for these earthquakes. This dissertation sheds light on the functions of disaster insurance schemes and their role in economic recovery post-earthquakes. The first chapter describes the demand and supply for earthquake insurance and provides insights about different public-private partnership earthquake insurance schemes around the world. In the second chapter, we concentrate on three public earthquake insurance schemes in California, Japan, and New Zealand. The chapter examines what would have been the outcome had the system of insurance in Christchurch been different in the aftermath of the Canterbury earthquake sequence (CES). We focus on the California Earthquake Authority insurance program, and the Japanese Earthquake Reinsurance scheme. Overall, the aggregate cost of the earthquake to the New Zealand public insurer (the Earthquake Commission) was USD 6.2 billion. If a similar-sized disaster event had occurred in Japan and California, homeowners would have received only around USD 1.6 billion and USD 0.7 billion from the Japanese and Californian schemes, respectively. We further describe the spatial and distributive aspects of these scenarios and discuss some of the policy questions that emerge from this comparison. The third chapter measures the longer-term effect of the CES on the local economy, using night-time light intensity measured from space, and focus on the role of insurance payments for damaged residential property during the local recovery process. Uniquely for this event, more than 95% of residential housing units were covered by insurance and almost all incurred some damage. However, insurance payments were staggered over 5 years, enabling us to identify their local impact. We find that night-time luminosity can capture the process of recovery; and that insurance payments contributed significantly to the process of local economic recovery after the earthquake. Yet, delayed payments were less affective in assisting recovery and cash settlement of claims were more effective than insurance-managed repairs. After the Christchurch earthquakes, the government declared about 8000 houses as Red Zoned, prohibiting further developments in these properties, and offering the owners to buy them out. The government provided two options for owners: the first was full payment for both land and dwelling at the 2007 property evaluation, the second was payment for land, and the rest to be paid by the owner‘s insurance. Most people chose the second option. Using data from LINZ combined with data from Stats NZ, the fourth chapter empirically investigates what led people to choose this second option, and how peer effect influenced the homeowners‘ choices. Due to climate change, public disclosure of coastal hazard information through maps and property reports have been used more frequently by local government. This is expected to raise awareness about disaster risks in local community and help potential property owners to make informed locational decision. However, media outlets and business sector argue that public hazard disclosure will cause a negative effect on property value. Despite this opposition, some district councils in New Zealand have attempted to implement improved disclosure. Kapiti Coast district in the Wellington region serves as a case study for this research. In the fifth chapter, we utilize the residential property sale data and coastal hazard maps from the local district council. This study employs a difference-in-difference hedonic property price approach to examine the effect of hazard disclosure on coastal property values. We also apply spatial hedonic regression methods, controlling for coastal amenities, as our robustness check. Our findings suggest that hazard designation has a statistically and economically insignificant impact on property values. Overall, the risk perception about coastal hazards should be more emphasized in communities.
