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.
Validation is an essential step to assess the applicability of simulated ground motions for utilization in engineering practice, and a comprehensive analysis should include both simple intensity measures (PGA, SA, etc), as well as the seismic response of a range of complex systems obtained by response history analysis. In order to enable a spectrum of complex structural systems to be considered in systematic validation of ground motion simulations in a routine fashion, an automated workflow was developed. Such a workflow enables validation of simulated ground motions in terms of different complex model responses by considering various ground motion sets and different ground motion simulation methods. The automated workflow converts the complex validation process into a routine one by providing a platform to perform the validation process promptly as a built-in process of simulation post-processing. As a case study, validation of simulated ground motions was investigated via the automated workflow by comparing the dynamic responses of three steel special moment frame (SMRF) subjected to the 40 observed and 40 simulated ground motions of 22 February 2011 Christchurch earthquake. The seismic responses of the structures are principally quantified via the peak floor acceleration and maximum inter-storey drift ratio. Overall, the results indicate a general agreement in seismic demands obtained using the recorded and simulated ensembles of ground motions and provide further evidence that simulated ground motions can be used in code-based structural performance assessments in-place of, or in combination with, ensembles of recorded ground motions.
