Following a damaging earthquake, the immediate emergency response is focused on individual collapsed buildings or other "hotspots" rather than the overall state of damage. This lack of attention to the global damage condition of the affected region can lead to the reporting of misinformation and generate confusion, causing difficulties when attempting to determine the level of postdisaster resources required. A pre-planned building damage survey based on the transect method is recommended as a simple tool to generate an estimate of the overall level of building damage in a city or region. A methodology for such a transect survey is suggested, and an example of a similar survey conducted in Christchurch, New Zealand, following the 22 February 2011 earthquake is presented. The transect was found to give suitably accurate estimates of building damage at a time when information was keenly sought by government authorities and the general public. VoR - Version of Record
The susceptibility of precast hollow-core floors to sustain critical damage during an earthquake is now well-recognized throughout the structural engineering community in New Zealand. The lack of shear reinforcement in these floor units is one of the primary reasons causing issues with the seismic performance of these floors. Recent research has revealed that the unreinforced webs of these floor units can crack at drift demands as low as 0.6%. Such observation indicates that potentially many of the existing building stock incorporating hollow-core flooring systems in cities of relatively high seismic activity (e.g. Wellington and Christchurch) that probably have already experienced a level of shaking higher than 0.6% drift in previous earthquakes might already have their floor units cracked. However, there is little information available to reliably quantify the residual gravity load-carrying capacity of cracked hollow-core floor units, highlighting the need to understand the post-cracking behavior of hollow-core floor units to better quantify the extent of the risk that cracked hollow-core floor units pose.
This paper explores the responses by a group of children to an art project that was undertaken by a small school in New Zealand after the September 2010 and February 2011 Christchurch earthquakes. Undertaken over a period of two years, the project aimed to find a suitable form of memorialising this significant event in a way that was appropriate and meaningful to the community. Alongside images that related directly to the event of the earthquakes, the art form of a mosaic was chosen, and consisted of images and symbols that clearly drew on the hopes and dreams of a school community who were refusing to be defined by the disaster. The paper 'writes' the mosaic by placing fragments of speech spoken by the children involved in relation to ideas about memory, affect, and the 'sublime', through the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard. The paper explores the mosaic as constituted by the literal and metaphorical 'broken pieces' of the city of Christchurch in ways that confer pedagogic value inscribed through the creation of a public art space by children. AM - Accepted Manuscript
