In response to the February 2011 earthquake, Parliament enacted the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act. This emergency legislation provided the executive with extreme powers that extended well beyond the initial emergency response and into the recovery phase. Although New Zealand has the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act 2002, it was unable to cope with the scale and intensity of the Canterbury earthquake sequence. Considering the well-known geological risk facing the Wellington region, this paper will consider whether a standalone “Disaster Recovery Act” should be established to separate an emergency and its response from the recovery phase. Currently, Government policy is to respond reactively to a disaster rather than proactively. In a major event, this typically involves the executive being given the ability to make rules, regulations and policy without the delay or oversight of normal legislative process. In the first part of this paper, I will canvas what a “Disaster Recovery Act” could prescribe and why there is a need to separate recovery from emergency. Secondly, I will consider the shortfalls in the current civil defence recovery framework which necessitates this kind of heavy governmental response after a disaster. In the final section, I will examine how
Abstract This study provides a simplified methodology for pre-event data collection to support a faster and more accurate seismic loss estimation. Existing pre-event data collection frameworks are reviewed. Data gathered after the Canterbury earthquake sequences are analysed to evaluate the relative importance of different sources of building damage. Conclusions drawns are used to explore new approaches to conduct pre-event building assessment.
The greater Wellington region, New Zealand, is highly vulnerable to large earthquakes. While attention has been paid to the consequences of earthquake damage to road, electricity and water supply networks, the consequences of wastewater network damage for public health, environmental health and habitability of homes remain largely unknown for Wellington City. The Canterbury and Kaikōura earthquakes have highlighted the vulnerability of sewerage systems to disruption during a disaster. Management of human waste is one of the critical components of disaster planning to reduce faecal-oral transmission of disease and exposure to disease-bearing vectors. In Canterbury and Kaikōura, emergency sanitation involved a combination of Port-a-loos, chemical toilets and backyard long-drops. While many lessons may be learned from experiences in Canterbury earthquakes, it is important to note that isolation is likely to be a much greater factor for Wellington households, compared to Christchurch, due to the potential for widespread landslides in hill suburbs affecting road access. This in turn implies that human waste may have to be managed onsite, as options such as chemical toilets and Port-a-loos rely completely on road access for delivering chemicals and collecting waste. While some progress has been made on options such as emergency composting toilets, significant knowledge gaps remain on how to safely manage waste onsite. In order to bridge these gaps, laboratory tests will be conducted through the second half of 2019 to assess the pathogen die-off rates in the composting toilet system with variables being the type of carbon bulking material and the addition of a Bokashi composting activator.
Tsunami events including the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami confirmed the need for Pacific-wide comprehensive risk mitigation and effective tsunami evacuation planning. New Zealand is highly exposed to tsunamis and continues to invest in tsunami risk awareness, readiness and response across the emergency management and science sectors. Evacuation is a vital risk reduction strategy for preventing tsunami casualties. Understanding how people respond to warnings and natural cues is an important element to improving evacuation modelling techniques. The relative rarity of tsunami events locally in Canterbury and also globally, means there is limited knowledge on tsunami evacuation behaviour, and tsunami evacuation planning has been largely informed by hurricane evacuations. This research aims to address this gap by analysing evacuation behaviour and movements of Kaikōura and Southshore/New Brighton (coastal suburb of Christchurch) residents following the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake. Stage 1 of the research is engaging with both these communities and relevant hazard management agencies, using a survey and community workshops to understand real-event evacuation behaviour during the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake and subsequent tsunami evacuations. The second stage is using the findings from stage 1 to inform an agent-based tsunami evacuation model, which is an approach that simulates of the movement of people during an evacuation response. This method improves on other evacuation modelling approaches to estimate evacuation times due to better representation of local population characteristics. The information provided by the communities will inform rules and interactions such as traffic congestion, evacuation delay times and routes taken to develop realistic tsunami evacuation models. This will allow emergency managers to more effectively prepare communities for future tsunami events, and will highlight recommended actions to increase the safety and efficiency of future tsunami evacuations.
The use of post-earthquake cordons as a tool to support emergency managers after an event has been documented around the world. However, there is limited research that attempts to understand the use, effectiveness, inherent complexities, impacts and subsequent consequences of cordoning once applied. This research aims to fill that gap by providing a detailed understanding of first, the cordons and associated processes, and their implications in a post-earthquake scenario. We use a qualitative method to understand cordons through case studies of two cities where it was used in different temporal and spatial scales: Christchurch (2011) and Wellington (Kaikōura earthquake 2016), New Zealand. Data was collected through 21 expert interviews obtained through purposive and snowball sampling of key informants who were directly or indirectly involved in a decision-making role and/or had influence in relation to the cordoning process. The participants were from varying backgrounds and roles i.e. emergency managers, council members, business representatives, insurance representatives, police and communication managers. The data was transcribed, coded in Nvivo and then grouped based on underlying themes and concepts and then analyzed inductively. It is found that cordons are used primarily as a tool to control access for the purpose of life safety and security. But cordons can also be adapted to support recovery. Broadly, it can be synthesized and viewed based on two key aspects, ‘decision-making’ and ‘operations and management’, which overlap and interact as part of a complex system. The underlying complexity arises in large part due to the multitude of sectors it transcends such as housing, socio-cultural requirements, economics, law, governance, insurance, evacuation, available resources etc. The complexity further increases as the duration of cordon is extended.
The operation of telecommunication networks is critical during business as usual times, and becomes most vital in post-disaster scenarios, when the services are most needed for restoring other critical lifelines, due to inherent interdependencies, and for supporting emergency and relief management tasks. In spite of the recognized critical importance, the assessment of the seismic performance for the telecommunication infrastructure appears to be underrepresented in the literature. The FP6 QuakeCoRE project “Performance of the Telecommunication Network during the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence” will provide a critical contribution to bridge this gap. Thanks to an unprecedented collaboration between national and international researchers and highly experienced asset managers from Chorus, data and evidences on the physical and functional performance of the telecommunication network after the Canterbury Earthquakes 2010-2011 have been collected and collated. The data will be processed and interpreted aiming to reveal fragilities and resilience of the telecommunication networks to seismic events
The 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence, and the resulting extensive data sets on damaged buildings that have been collected, provide a unique opportunity to exercise and evaluate previously published seismic performance assessment procedures. This poster provides an overview of the authors’ methodology to perform evaluations with two such assessment procedures, namely the P-58 guidelines and the REDi Rating System. P-58, produced by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the United States, aims to facilitate risk assessment and decision-making by quantifying earthquake ground shaking, structural demands, component damage and resulting consequences in a logical framework. The REDi framework, developed by the engineering firm ARUP, aids stakeholders in implementing resilience-based earthquake design. Preliminary results from the evaluations are presented. These have the potential to provide insights on the ability of the assessment procedures to predict impacts using “real-world” data. However, further work remains to critically analyse these results and to broaden the scope of buildings studied and of impacts predicted.
Natural catastrophes are increasing worldwide. They are becoming more frequent but also more severe and impactful on our built environment leading to extensive damage and losses. Earthquake events account for the smallest part of natural events; nevertheless seismic damage led to the most fatalities and significant losses over the period 1981-2016 (Munich Re). Damage prediction is helpful for emergency management and the development of earthquake risk mitigation projects. Recent design efforts focused on the application of performance-based design engineering where damage estimation methodologies use fragility and vulnerability functions. However, the approach does not explicitly specify the essential criteria leading to economic losses. There is thus a need for an improved methodology that finds the critical building elements related to significant losses. The here presented methodology uses data science techniques to identify key building features that contribute to the bulk of losses. It uses empirical data collected on site during earthquake reconnaissance mission to train a machine learning model that can further be used for the estimation of building damage post-earthquake. The first model is developed for Christchurch. Empirical building damage data from the 2010-2011 earthquake events is analysed to find the building features that contributed the most to damage. Once processed, the data is used to train a machine-learning model that can be applied to estimate losses in future earthquake events.
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.”
Nowadays the telecommunication systems’ performance has a substantial impact on our lifestyle. Their operationality becomes even more substantial in a post-disaster scenario when these services are used in civil protection and emergency plans, as well as for the restoration of all the other critical infrastructure. Despite the relevance of loss of functionality of telecommunication networks on seismic resilience, studies on their performance assessment are few in the literature. The telecommunication system is a distributed network made up of several components (i.e. ducts, utility holes, cabinets, major and local exchanges). Given that these networks cover a large geographical area, they can be easily subjected to the effects of a seismic event, either the ground shaking itself, or co-seismic events such as liquefaction and landslides. In this paper, an analysis of the data collected after the 2010-2011 Canterbury Earthquake Sequence (CES) and the 2016 Kaikoura Earthquake in New Zealand is conducted. Analysing these data, information gaps are critically identified regarding physical and functional failures of the telecommunication components, the timeline of repair/reconstruction activities and service recovery, geotechnical tests and land planning maps. Indeed, if these missing data were presented, they could aid the assessment of the seismic resilience. Thus, practical improvements in the post-disaster collection from both a network and organisational viewpoints are proposed through consultation of national and international researchers and highly experienced asset managers from Chorus. Finally, an outline of future studies which could guide towards a more resilient seismic performance of the telecommunication network is presented.
This thesis investigates life-safety risk in earthquakes. The first component of the thesis utilises a dataset of earthquake injuries and deaths from recent earthquakes in New Zealand to identify cause, context, and risk factors of injury and death in the 2011 MW6.3 Christchurch earthquake and 2016 MW7.8 Kaikōura earthquake. Results show that nearly all deaths occurred from being hit by structural elements from buildings, while most injuries were caused by falls, strains and being hit by contents or non-structural elements. Statistical analysis of injured cases compared to an uninjured control group found that age, gender, building damage, shaking intensity, and behaviour during shaking were the most significant risk factors for injury during these earthquakes. The second part of the thesis uses the empirical findings from the first section to develop two tools for managing life-safety risk in earthquakes. The first tool is a casualty estimation model for health system and emergency response planning. An existing casualty model used in New Zealand was validated against observed data from the 2011 Christchurch earthquake and found to underestimate moderate and severe injuries by an order of magnitude. The model was then updated to include human behaviour such as protective actions, falls and strain type injuries that are dependent on shaking intensity, as well as injuries and deaths outside buildings. These improvements resulted in a closer fit to observed casualties for the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. The second tool that was developed is a framework to set seismic loading standards for design based on fatality risk targets. The proposed framework extends the risk-targeted hazard method, by moving beyond collapse risk targets, to fatality risk targets for individuals in buildings and societal risk in cities. The framework also includes treatment of epistemic uncertainty in seismic hazard to allow this uncertainty to be used in risk-based decision making. The framework is demonstrated by showing how the current New Zealand loading standards could be revised to achieve uniform life-safety risk across the country and how the introduction of a new loading factor can reduce risk aggregation in cities. Not on Alma, moved and emailed. 1/02/2023 ce
The supply of water following disasters has always been of significant concern to communities. Failure of water systems not only causes difficulties for residents and critical users but may also affect other hard and soft infrastructure and services. The dependency of communities and other infrastructure on the availability of safe and reliable water places even more emphasis on the resilience of water supply systems. This thesis makes two major contributions. First, it proposes a framework for measuring the multifaceted resilience of water systems, focusing on the significance of the characteristics of different communities for the resilience of water supply systems. The proposed framework, known as the CARE framework, consists of eight principal activities: (1) developing a conceptual framework; (2) selecting appropriate indicators; (3) refining the indicators based on data availability; (4) correlation analysis; (5) scaling the indicators; (6) weighting the variables; (7) measuring the indicators; and (8) aggregating the indicators. This framework allows researchers to develop appropriate indicators in each dimension of resilience (i.e., technical, organisational, social, and economic), and enables decision makers to more easily participate in the process and follow the procedure for composite indicator development. Second, it identifies the significant technical, social, organisational and economic factors, and the relevant indicators for measuring these factors. The factors and indicators were gathered through a comprehensive literature review. They were then verified and ranked through a series of interviews with water supply and resilience specialists, social scientists and economists. Vulnerability, redundancy and criticality were identified as the most significant technical factors affecting water supply system robustness, and consequently resilience. These factors were tested for a scenario earthquake of Mw 7.6 in Pukerua Bay in New Zealand. Four social factors and seven indicators were identified in this study. The social factors are individual demands and capacities, individual involvement in the community, violence level in the community, and trust. The indicators are the Giving Index, homicide rate, assault rate, inverse trust in army, inverse trust in police, mean years of school, and perception of crime. These indicators were tested in Chile and New Zealand, which experienced earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 respectively. The social factors were also tested in Vanuatu following TC Pam, which hit the country in March 2015. Interestingly, the organisational dimension contributed the largest number of factors and indicators for measuring water supply resilience to disasters. The study identified six organisational factors and 17 indicators that can affect water supply resilience to disasters. The factors are: disaster precaution; predisaster planning; data availability, data accessibility and information sharing; staff, parts, and equipment availability; pre-disaster maintenance; and governance. The identified factors and their indicators were tested for the case of Christchurch, New Zealand, to understand how organisational capacity affected water supply resilience following the earthquake in February 2011. Governance and availability of critical staff following the earthquake were the strongest organisational factors for the Christchurch City Council, while the lack of early warning systems and emergency response planning were identified as areas that needed to be addressed. Economic capacity and quick access to finance were found to be the main economic factors influencing the resilience of water systems. Quick access to finance is most important in the early stages following a disaster for response and restoration, but its importance declines over time. In contrast, the economic capacity of the disaster struck area and the water sector play a vital role in the subsequent reconstruction phase rather than in the response and restoration period. Indicators for these factors were tested for the case of the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. Finally, a new approach to measuring water supply resilience is proposed. This approach measures the resilience of the water supply system based on actual water demand following an earthquake. The demand-based method calculates resilience based on the difference between water demand and system capacity by measuring actual water shortage (i.e., the difference between water availability and demand) following an earthquake.
