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.
This paper presents the preliminary conclusions of the first stage of Wellington Case Study project (Regulating For Resilience in an Earthquake Vulnerable City) being undertaken by the Disaster Law Research Group at the University of Canterbury Law School. This research aims to map the current regulatory environment around improving the seismic resilience of the urban built environment. This work provides the basis for the second stage of the project which will map the regulatory tools onto the reality of the current building stock in Wellington. Using a socio-legal methodology, the current research examines the regulatory framework around seismic resilience for existing buildings in New Zealand, with a particularly focus on multi-storey in the Wellington CBD. The work focusses both on the operation and impact of the formal seismic regulatory tools open to public regulators (under the amended Building Act) as other non-seismic regulatory tools. As well as examining the formal regulatory frame, the work also provides an assessment of the interactions between other non-building acts (such as Health and Safety at Work Act 2015) on the requirements of seismic resilience. Other soft-law developments (particularly around informal building standards) are also examined. The final output of this work will presents this regulatory map in a clear and easily accessible manner and provide an assessment of the suitability of this at times confusing and patchy legal environment as Wellington moves towards becoming a resilient city. The final conclusion of this work will be used to specifically examine the ability of Wellington to make this transition under the current regulatory environment as phase two of the Wellington Case Study project.
1. INTRODUCTION. Earthquakes and geohazards, such as liquefaction, landslides and rock falls, constitute a major risk for New Zealand communities and can have devastating impacts as the Canterbury 2010/2011 experience shows. Development patterns expose communities to an array of natural hazards, including tsunamis, floods, droughts, and sea level rise amongst others. Fostering community resilience is therefore vitally important. As the rhetoric of resilience is mainstreamed into the statutory framework, a major challenge emerges: how can New Zealand operationalize this complex and sometimes contested concept and build ‘community capitals’? This research seeks to provide insights to this question by critically evaluating how community capitals are conceptualized and how they can contribute to community resilience in the context of the Waimakariri District earthquake recovery and regeneration process.
Seismic isolation is an effective technology for significantly reducing damage to buildings and building contents. However, its application to light-frame wood buildings has so far been unable to overcome cost and technical barriers such as susceptibility to movement during high-wind loading. The precursor to research in the field of isolation of residential buildings was the 1994 Northridge Earthquake (6.7 MW) in the United States and the 1995 Kobe Earthquake (6.9 MW) in Japan. While only a small number of lives were lost in residential buildings in these events, the economic impact was significant with over half of earthquake recovery costs given to repair and reconstruction of residential building damage. A value case has been explored to highlight the benefits of seismically isolated residential buildings compared to a standard fixed-base dwellings for the Wellington region. Loss data generated by insurance claim information from the 2011 Christchurch Earthquake has been used by researchers to determine vulnerability functions for the current light-frame wood building stock. By further considering the loss attributed to drift and acceleration sensitive components, and a simplified single degree of freedom (SDOF) building model, a method for determining vulnerability functions for seismic isolated buildings was developed. Vulnerability functions were then applied directly in a loss assessment using the GNS developed software, RiskScape. Vulnerability was shown to dramatically reduce for isolated buildings compared to an equivalent fixed-base building and as a result, the monetary savings in a given earthquake scenario were significant. This work is expected to drive further interest for development of solutions for the seismic isolation of residential dwellings, of which one option is further considered and presented herein.
