Damaged buildings along London Street. Wire fencing has been used to keep people away. From the left are the Volcano Cafe, the Lava Bar, a fish and chip shop, and the Coastal Living Design Store. Rubble from the side of the Volcano Cafe can be seen along the Canterbury Street footpath.
Structural Engineers from the New Zealand and Los Angeles County Fire Department Urban Search and Rescue teams outside the Kenton Chambers Building on Hereford Street.
A photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Now there's a new Christchurch scene. People clad in high-vis and buildings that look temporary painted jauntily".
A PDF copy of The Star newspaper, published on Wednesday 5 December 2012.
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Detail of the windows in Alice in Videoland. The building was designed with permanence and strength in mind and the new owner intends the fit out to have the same feel of permanence. His aspiration is to build the best coffee house in the world and the largest in Christchurch".
A photograph of a window of the IRD building. Directions to a rear entrance have been written on the window.
A view down New Regent Street. Several of the buildings have had their verandahs propped with steel poles, and scaffolding has been constructed on their facades.
A photograph of a section of a piece of street art on the side of a building between Brighton Mall and Hawke Street. This section of the artwork has been painted around a sign which warns the building is under electronic surveillance.
It is well known that buildings constructed using unreinforced masonry (URM) are susceptible to damage from earthquake induced lateral forces that may result in partial or full building collapse. The 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquakes are the most recent New Zealand example of destructive earthquakes, which have drawn people's attention to the inherent seismic weaknesses of URM buildings and anchored masonry veneer systems in New Zealand. A brief review of the data collected following the 2010 Darfield earthquake and more comprehensive documentation of data that was collected following the 2011 Christchurch earthquake is presented, along with the findings from subsequent data interrogation. Large stocks of earthquake prone vintage URM buildings that remain in New Zealand and in other seismically active parts of the world result in the need for minimally invasive and cost effective seismic retrofit techniques. The principal objective of the doctoral research reported herein was to investigate the applicability of near surface mounted (NSM) carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) strips as a seismic improvement technique. A comprehensive experimental program consisting of 53 pull tests is presented and is used to assess the accuracy of existing FRP-to-masonry bond models, with a modified model being proposed. The strength characteristics of vintage clay brick URM wall panels from two existing URM buildings was established and used as a benchmark when manufacturing replica clay brick test assemblages. The applicability of using NSM CFRP strips as a retrofitting technique for improving the shear strength and the ductility capacity of multi-leaf URM walls constructed using solid clay brick masonry is investigated by varying CFRP reinforcement ratios. Lastly, an experimental program was undertaken to validate the proposed design methodology for improving the strength capacity of URM walls. The program involved testing full-scale walls in a laboratory setting and testing full-scale walls in-situ in existing vintage URM buildings. Experimental test results illustrated that the NSM CFRP technique is an effective method to seismically strengthen URM buildings.
The research presented in this thesis investigated the environmental impacts of structural design decisions across the life of buildings located in seismic regions. In particular, the impacts of expected earthquake damage were incorporated into a traditional life cycle assessment (LCA) using a probabilistic method, and links between sustainable and resilient design were established for a range of case-study buildings designed for different seismic performance objectives. These links were quantified using a metric herein referred to as the seismic carbon risk, which represents the expected environmental impacts and resource use indicators associated with earthquake damage during buildings’ life. The research was broken into three distinct parts: (1) a city-level evaluation of the environmental impacts of demolitions following the 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence in New Zealand, (2) the development of a probabilistic framework to incorporate earthquake damage into LCA, and (3) using case-study buildings to establish links between sustainable and resilient design. The first phase of the research focused on the environmental impacts of demolitions in Christchurch, New Zealand following the 2010/2011 Canterbury Earthquake Sequence. This large case study was used to investigate the environmental impact of the demolition of concrete buildings considering the embodied carbon and waste stream distribution. The embodied carbon was considered here as kilograms of CO2 equivalent that occurs on production, construction, and waste management stage. The results clearly demonstrated the significant environmental impacts that can result from moderate and large earthquakes in urban areas, and the importance of including environmental considerations when making post-earthquake demolition decisions. The next phase of the work introduced a framework for incorporating the impacts of expected earthquake damage based on a probabilistic approach into traditional LCA to allow for a comparison of seismic design decisions using a carbon lens. Here, in addition to initial construction impacts, the seismic carbon risk was quantified, including the impacts of seismic repair activities and total loss scenarios assuming reconstruction in case of non-reparability. A process-based LCA was performed to obtain the environmental consequence functions associated with structural and non-structural repair activities for multiple environmental indicators. In the final phase of the work, multiple case-study buildings were used to investigate the seismic consequences of different structural design decisions for buildings in seismic regions. Here, two case-study buildings were designed to multiple performance objectives, and the upfront carbon costs, and well as the seismic carbon risk across the building life were compared. The buildings were evaluated using the framework established in phase 2, and the results demonstrated that the seismic carbon risk can significantly be reduced with only minimal changes to the upfront carbon for buildings designed for a higher base shear or with seismic protective systems. This provided valuable insight into the links between resilient and sustainable design decisions. Finally, the results and observations from the work across the three phases of research described above were used to inform a discussion on important assumptions and topics that need to be considered when quantifying the environmental impacts of earthquake damage on buildings. These include: selection of a non-repairable threshold (e.g. a value beyond which a building would be demolished rather than repaired), the time value of carbon (e.g. when in the building life the carbon is released), the changing carbon intensity of structural materials over time, and the consideration of deterministic vs. probabilistic results. Each of these topics was explored in some detail to provide a clear pathway for future work in this area.
View of The Press building, taken from the roof of the Warners Novotel, Cathedral Square.
A photograph of street art on the side of a building between Brighton Mall and Hawke Street.
A PDF copy of The Star newspaper, published on Friday 9 November 2012.
An image from a Navy Today April 2011 article titled, "Cordon Patrols in Lyttelton". The image is of Canterbury sailors at work removing fallen bricks from between buildings in Lyttelton.
Demolition underway on a walk around the city to catch up on events happening June 25, 2014 Christchurch New Zealand.
A PDF copy of The Star newspaper, published on Wednesday 31 October 2012.
Structural Engineers from the New Zealand and Los Angeles County Fire Department Urban Search and Rescue teams performing assessments of buildings on High Street near Manchester Street.
A photograph of street art on a building between Brighton Mall and Beresford Street.
A photograph of street art on a building between Brighton Mall and Beresford Street.
A photograph of street art constructed against the wall of a building in New Brighton Mall. The artwork is titled, "My Hope for New Brighton", and consists of a blackboard full of messages and images from the public.
A photograph of street art constructed against the wall of a building in New Brighton Mall. The artwork is titled, "My Hope for New Brighton", and consists of a blackboard full of messages and images from the public.
PGC - Pyne Gould Corporation building; photo taken from the roof of the Warners Novotel, Cathedral Square.
Lei Zhang, a member of the University of Canterbury's E-Learning team, in their temporary office in the University Printery building. The photographer comments, "The University restarts its teaching, and the techies in e-learning move out of NZi3. We are sharing an office at the printery building. Richard Holliday and Aimee Leaning do their pre-press and outsourcing work, while Lei configures a new video streaming system".
Rubble from TJ's Kazbah on the corner of Marine Parade and Bowhill Road. The Ozone Hotel is visible in the foreground. The photographer comments, "A bike ride to New Brighton and the beach 3 weeks after the Feb 22 quake. Roads were still very rough and under reconstruction. There was a building on the corner, but not now".
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "The Historic Post Office in Cathedral Square from the site of the Regent Theatre with the new Telecom building to the right".
Structural Engineers from the New Zealand and Los Angeles County Fire Department Urban Search and Rescue teams performing an assessment of the Kenton Chambers Building on Hereford Street.
Structural Engineers from the New Zealand and Los Angeles County Fire Department Urban Search and Rescue teams performing an assessment of the Kenton Chambers Building on Hereford Street.
A photograph of a mural on the side of a building in New Brighton Mall. The mural depicts a beach and has a poem painted over the top.
A pdf transcript of Heather Bundy's second earthquake story, captured by the UC QuakeBox Take 2 project. Interviewer: Samuel Hope. Transcriber: Josie Hepburn.
A photograph of street art on the side of a building between Brighton Mall and Hawke Street.