There are many tales of generosity beginning in emerge in Christchurch. Evan Coster from Rangiora was working in Harvey Norman when the earthquake struck on Tuesday. He doesn't know if he has a job to go back to and with time on his hands wanted to do something useful. He started visiting local businesses in Rangiora such as Warehouse, Countdown, New World and service stations for donations of cups, coffee, sugar and milk. Then he rallied friends and family together and started delivering refreshments to emergency workers in all of the cordons in the CBD.
Insurance company Tower says yesterday's earthquake in North Canterbury will cost it a maximum of just over seven million dollars.
The cost of building a home in New Zealand's main cities has risen by 20 per cent since the Canterbury earthquakes.
Treasury has revised its sums on what it thinks will be the full cost of the Canterbury earthquake - which is now estimated at four billion dollars.
How will the government pay its estimated $5 billion share of the rebuild of Christchurch?
The cost of insurance could rise by 20 per cent as a result of the Government bailout of AMI Insurance and the mounting cost of the Canterbury earthquakes.
A graphic showing the cost of the earthquakes.
Discusses the uneven economic cost of the Christchurch earthquake.
A chart showing the cost of earthquake damage across Canterbury.
A graphic showing the cost of the earthquakes to Canterbury sport.
A graphic showing the cost of infrastructure repairs across the city.
Some Canterbury homeowners are worried that missed earthquake damage to concrete slabs could result in another big bill for the taxpayer. This comes only weeks after EQC told Checkpoint that the cost of mis-scoped damage or defective repairs following the Canterbury earthquakes could cost up to $1 billion. This includes $450 million for botched repairs, including badly repaired rubble ring foundations, and $300 million for an ex gratia payment to about 1000 over-cap onsold homeowners. But some Canterbury homeowners who bought after the earthquakes - and did their due diligence - are only discovering damage to their concrete slab foundations now. Logan Church reports.
Political Editor Brent Edwards reports live from parliament on the implications of the rising costs of the Christchurch earthquake for the EQC and the Government's finances.
The company running the restoration of Christchurch's Anglican Cathedral is confident it will be able to raise the extra $51 million still needed to finish the job, and says potential large donors are already being approached here and overseas. The building has sat derelict since the 2011 earthquake and now the cost to fix it has soared from an original estimate of $104 million to $154 million. Some Cantabrians are finding the price hard to justify. The director of the restoration project Keith Paterson speaks to Corin Dann.
The Canterbury earthquake has pushed up the cost to the government of borrowing on world markets.
A video of an address by Michael Rouse, National Lead at Deloitte Australia, at the 2014 Seismics and the City forum. This talk was part of the Building Confidence section, and covered the role of the external advisory in project execution and construction management in terms of ensuring best practice and cost savings.
The Government's books are continuing to deteriorate as the cost of the Christchurch earthquake is added to a rising operating deficit.
The Transport Agency says initial repairs to State Highways damaged in the Canterbury earthquake could cost up to six million dollars.
It could be up to 18 months before 660 Christchurch homeowners know who will pay for earthquake damage repairs with a $1 billion price tag. The bill to fix houses in Christchurch that weren't repaired properly the first time round, or have suffered more damage in aftershocks, is climbing - and the government can't say who's liable. The problem is the homes have new owners who can't claim on theri insurance because the damage pre-dates them owning the home. Earlier Greater Christchurch Regeneration Minister Megan Woods told us the previous National government put no plan in place, and the current government is being left to pick up the pieces. Former Christchurch earthquake recovery minister Gerry Brownlee disputes the issue.
Economics Correspondent Nigel Stirling talks about expectations from the Government's economic package to be announced this afternoon to help meet the cost of the Christchurch earthquake.
A graph shows an earthquake registering 7.1 on the Richter scale and $2 billion on the 'Wreckter' scale. An arrow shoots upwards from the $2 billion anticipating that the cost will rise higher. Text above reads 'SIZE-mic does matter'. Refers to the Christchurch earthquake of Saturday 4th September 2010 and the cost of the damage. No-one was killed. Quantity: 1 digital cartoon(s).
Listed general insurance company Tower has reported a bigger first half loss on lingering Canterbury earthquake claims and a write down in its computer systrems.
Insurance premiums look set to rise by up to a third and even more to meet the cost of the Christchurch earthquakes and other disasters overseas.
The Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission will hear this week that the cost of upgrading the city's unreinforced masonry buildings is more than the buildings are worth.
The Finance Minister says the Government will cover the ten billion dollar cost of the Christchurch earthquake by borrowing more rather than cutting spending or putting up taxes.
Three years on from the earthquakes that crippled Christchurch's infrastructure, the city has yet to see costings and timeframes for the delivery of a revamped transport system for the central city.
The construction of the first bridge in Canterbury to be built to the new earthquake design codes is going to take nearly two years and cost over 30 million dollars.
The Canterbury earthquake could force up the cost of building in the region by five percent but the Reserve Bank says it'll ignore that kind of inflation unless it affects the whole country.
Recently developed performance-based earthquake engineering framework, such as one provided by PEER (Deierlein et al. 2003), assist in the quantification in terms of performance such as casualty, monetary losses and downtime. This opens up the opportunity to identify cost-effective retrofit/rehabilitation strategies by comparing upfront costs associated with retrofit with the repair costs that can be expected over time. This loss assessment can be strengthened by learning from recent earthquakes, such as the 2010 Canterbury and 2016 Kaikoura earthquakes. In order to investigate which types of retrofit/rehabilitation strategies may be most cost-effective, a case study building was chosen for this research. The Pacific Tower, a 22-storey EBF apartment located within the Christchurch central business district (CBD), was damaged and repaired during the 2010 Canterbury earthquake series. As such, by taking hazard levels accordingly (i.e. to correspond to the Christchurch CBD), modelling and analysing the structure, and considering the vulnerability and repair costs of its different components, it is possible to predict the expected losses of the aforementioned building. Using this information, cost-effective retrofit/rehabilitation strategy can be determined. This research found that more often than not, it would be beneficial to improve the performance of valuable non-structural components, such as partitions. Although it is true that improving such elements will increase the initial costs, over time, the benefits gained from reduced losses should be expected to overcome the initial costs. Aftershocks do increase the predicted losses of a building even in lower intensities due to the fact that non-structural components can get damaged at such low intensities. By comparing losses computed with and without consideration of aftershocks for a range of historical earthquakes, it was found that the ratio between losses due to main shock with aftershocks to the losses due to the main shock only tended to increase with increasing main shock magnitude. This may be due to the fact that larger magnitude earthquakes tend to generate larger magnitude aftershocks and as those aftershocks happen within a region around the main shock, they are more likely to cause intense shaking and additional damage. In addition to this observation, it was observed that the most significant component of loss of the case study building was the non-structural partition walls.
By closely examining the performance of a 22-storey steel framed building in Christchurch subject to various earthquakes over the past seven years, it is shown that a number of lessons can be learnt regarding the cost-effective consideration of non-structural elements. The first point in this work is that non-structural elements significantly affected the costs associated with repairing steel eccentrically braced frame (EBF) links. The decommissioning or rerouting of non-structural elements in the vicinity of damaged links in the case study building attributed to approximately half the total cost of their repair. Such costs could be significantly reduced if the original positioning of non-structural elements took account of the potential need to repair the EBF links. The second point highlighted is the role that pre-cast cladding apparently played on the distribution and type of damage in the building. Loss estimates obtained following the FEMA P-58 framework vary considerably when cladding is or isnt modelled, both because of changes to drift demands up the height of the building and because certain types of subsequent damage are likely to be cheaper to repair than others. Finally, costly repairs to non-structural partition walls were required not only after the moment magnitude 7.1 earthquake in 2010 but also in multiple aftershocks in the years that followed. Repair costs associated with aftershock events exceeded those from the main event, emphasizing the need to consider aftershocks within modern performance-based earthquake engineering and also the opportunity that exists to make more cost-effective repair strategies following damaging earthquakes.