Architect Bob Burnett is part of a class action group yet to resolve claims with Southern Response. The group argues the insurer, which was established to settle outstanding AMI claims, has systematically short-changed them. Mr Burnett said the insurer had done more damage to his home than had been done in the earthquakes. The 40 members of the class action group head to court next Wednesday.
We measure the longer-term effect of a major earthquake on the local economy, using night-time light intensity measured from space, and investigate whether insurance claim payments for damaged residential property affected the local recovery process. We focus on the destructive Canterbury Earthquake Sequence (CES) 2010 -2011 as our case study. Uniquely for this event, more than 95% of residential housing units were covered by insurance, but insurance payments were staggered over 5 years, enabling us to identify their local impact. We find that night-time luminosity can capture the process of recovery and describe the recovery’s determinants. We also find that insurance payments contributed significantly to the process of economic recovery after the earthquake, but delayed payments were less affective and cash settlement of claims were more effective than insurance-managed repairs in contributing to local recovery.
Background and methodology The Mw 7.8, 14th November 2016 earthquake centred (item b, figure 1) in the Hurunui District of the South Island, New Zealand, damaged critical infrastructure across North Canterbury and Marlborough. We investigate the impacts to infrastructure and adaptations to the resulting service disruption in four small rural towns (figure 1): Culverden (a), Waiau (c), Ward (d) and Seddon (e). This is accomplished though literary research, interviews and geospatial analysis. Illustrating our methods, we have displayed here a Hurunui District hazard map (figure 2b) and select infrastructure inventories (figures 2a, 3).
The 14 November 2016 Kaikōura earthquake had major impacts on New Zealand's transport system. Road, rail and port infrastructure was damaged, creating substantial disruption for transport operators, residents, tourists, and business owners in the Canterbury, Marlborough and Wellington regions, with knock-on consequences elsewhere. During both the response and recovery phases, a large amount of information and data relating to the transport system was generated, managed, analysed, and exchanged within and between organisations to assist decision making. To improve information and data exchanges and related decision making in the transport sector during future events and guide new resilience strategies, we present key findings from a recent post-earthquake assessment. The research involved 35 different stakeholder groups and was conducted for the Ministry of Transport. We consider what transport information was available, its usefulness, where it was sourced from, mechanisms for data transfer between organisations, and suggested approaches for continued monitoring.
<b>In the late 1960s the Wellington City Council surveyed all the commercial buildings in the city and marked nearly 200 as earthquake prone. The owners were given 15 years to either strengthen or demolish their buildings. The end result was mass demolition throughout the seventies and eighties.¹ Prompted by the Christchurch earthquakes, once again the council has published a list of over 630 earthquake prone buildings that need to be strengthened or demolished by 2030.²Of these earthquake prone buildings, the majority were built between 1880 and 1930, with 125 buildings appearing on the Wellington City Council Heritage Building List.³ This list accounts for a significant proportion of character buildings in the city. There is a danger that the aesthetic integrity of our city will be further damaged due to the urgent need to strengthen these buildings. Many of the building owners are resistant because of the high cost. By adapting these buildings to house co-workspaces, we can gain more than just the retention of the building’s heritage. The seismic upgrade provides the opportunity for the office space to be redesigned to suit changes in the ways we work. Through a design-based research approach this thesis proposes a framework that clarifies the process of adapting Wellington’s earthquake prone heritage buildings to accommodate co-working. This framework deals with the key concepts of program, structure and heritage. The framework is tested on one of Wellington’s earthquake prone heritage buildings, the Wellington Working Men’s Club, in order to demonstrate what can be gained from this strengthening process. ¹ Reid, J., “Hometown Boomtown,” in NZ On Screen (Wellington, 1983).</b> ² Wellington City Council, List of Earthquake Prone Buildings as at 06/03/2017. (Wellington: Absolutely Positively Wellington. 2017). ³ ibid.
The decision on what to do with Christchurch's earthquake damaged redzone is one step closer, with the end of the public consultation period on the plan for the area. Over the past month Christchurch people have been asked to comment on a draft land use plan for the 602 hectares of land. Now those pitching ideas want the authorities to get on with the next step, so they can have some certainty about whether their projects can go ahead.
Businesses in the Christchurch suburb of New Brighton say something needs to be done urgently to pull the area out of an economic slump. The seaside town has struggled since the Canterbury Earthquakes, with thousands of people - and customers - leaving the area due to land damage under their homes. And they're pointing the fingers at city leaders like the Christchurch City Council and its rebuild agency, Development Christchurch. Logan Church spoke to New Brighton business owner Nigel Gilmore.
A Christchurch homeowner in a five year battle with the Earthquake Commission over the damaged house she unwittingly bought says a critical new report about EQC tells her nothing new. The 27 page review by Independent Ministerial Advisor Christine Stevenson looks at how to resolve the 3,600 claims that still haven't been settled after the 2010 and 2011 quakes. The recommendations include getting the Commission to hire more staff and to stop forcing people to use the Official Information Act to get their files. It also suggests giving EQC more power to settle the on-sold claims where people bought houses under the impression all damage had been identified and fixed. Georgina Hannafin has a home that needs $260,000 worth of repairs but EQC has offered her just $48,000.
On November 14 2016 a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck the south island of New Zealand. The earthquake lasted for just two minutes with severe seismic shaking and damage in the Hurunui and Kaikōura districts. Although these are predominantly rural areas, with scattered small towns and mountainous topography, they also contain road and rail routes that are essential parts of the national transport infrastructure. This earthquake and the subsequent recovery are of particular significance as they represent a disaster following in close proximity to another similar disaster, with the Canterbury earthquakes occurring in a neighboring district five years earlier. The research used an inductive qualitative case study to explore the nature of the Kaikōura recovery. That recovery process involved a complex interplay between the three parties; (a) the existing local government in the district, (b) central government agencies funding the recovery of the local residents and the national transport infrastructure, and (c) recovery leaders arriving with recent expertise from the earlier Canterbury disaster. It was evident that three groups: locals, government, and experts represented a multi-party governance debate in which the control of the Kaikōura earthquake recovery was shared amongst them. Each party had their own expertise, adgenda and networks that they brought to the Kaikōura recovery, but this created tensions between external expertise and local, community leadership. Recent earthquake research suggests that New Zealand is currently in the midst of an earthquake cluster, with further seismic disasters likely to occur in relatively close succession. This is likely to be compounded by the increasing frequency of other natural disasters with the effects of climate change. The present study investigates a phenomenon that may become increasingly common, with the transfer of disaster expertise from one event to another, and the interface between those experts with local and national government in directing recoveries. The findings of this study have implications for practitioners and policy makers in NZ and other countries where disasters are experienced in close spatial and temporal proximity.
One of the most controversial issues highlighted by the 2010-2011 Christchurch earthquake series and more recently the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake, has been the evident difficulty and lack of knowledge and guidelines for: a) evaluation of the residual capacity damaged buildings to sustain future aftershocks; b) selection and implementation of a series of reliable repairing techniques to bring back the structure to a condition substantially the same as prior to the earthquake; and c) predicting the cost (or cost-effectiveness) of such repair intervention, when compared to fully replacement costs while accounting for potential aftershocks in the near future. As a result of such complexity and uncertainty (i.e., risk), in combination with the possibility (unique in New Zealand when compared to most of the seismic-prone countries) to rely on financial support from the insurance companies, many modern buildings, in a number exceeding typical expectations from past experiences at an international level, have ended up being demolished. This has resulted in additional time and indirect losses prior to the full reconstruction, as well as in an increase in uncertainty on the actual relocation of the investment. This research project provides the main end-users and stakeholders (practitioner engineers, owners, local and government authorities, insurers, and regulatory agencies) with comprehensive evidence-based information to assess the residual capacity of damage reinforced concrete buildings, and to evaluate the feasibility of repairing techniques, in order to support their delicate decision-making process of repair vs. demolition or replacement. Literature review on effectiveness of epoxy injection repairs, as well as experimental tests on full-scale beam-column joints shows that repaired specimens have a reduced initial stiffness compared with the undamaged specimen, with no apparent strength reduction, sometimes exhibiting higher displacement ductility capacities. Although the bond between the steel and concrete is only partially restored, it still allows the repaired specimen to dissipate at least the same amount of hysteretic energy. Experimental tests on buildings subjected to earthquake loading demonstrate that even for severe damage levels, the ability of the epoxy injection to restore the initial stiffness of the structure is significant. Literature review on damage assessment and repair guidelines suggests that there is consensus within the international community that concrete elements with cracks less than 0.2 mm wide only require cosmetic repairs; epoxy injection repairs of cracks less and 2.0 mm wide and concrete patching of spalled cover concrete (i.e., minor to moderate damage) is an appropiate repair strategy; and for severe damaged components (e.g., cracks greater than 2.0 mm wide, crushing of the concrete core, buckling of the longitudinal reinforcement) local replacement of steel and/or concrete in addition to epoxy crack injection is more appropriate. In terms of expected cracking patterns, non-linear finite element investigations on well-designed reinforced concrete beam-to-column joints, have shown that lower number of cracks but with wider openings are expected to occur for larger compressive concrete strength, f’c, and lower reinforcement content, ρs. It was also observed that the tensile concrete strength, ft, strongly affects the expected cracking pattern in the beam-column joints, the latter being more uniformly distributed for lower ft values. Strain rate effects do not seem to play an important role on the cracking pattern. However, small variations in the cracking pattern were observed for low reinforcement content as it approaches to the minimum required as per NZS 3101:2006. Simple equations are proposed in this research project to relate the maximum and residual crack widths with the steel strain at peak displacement, with or without axial load. A literature review on fracture of reinforcing steel due to low-cycle fatigue, including recent research using steel manufactured per New Zealand standards is also presented. Experimental results describing the influence of the cyclic effect on the ultimate strain capacity of the steel are also discussed, and preliminary equations to account for that effect are proposed. A literature review on the current practice to assess the seismic residual capacity of structures is also presented. The various factors affecting the residual fatigue life at a component level (i.e., plastic hinge) of well-designed reinforced concrete frames are discussed, and equations to quantify each of them are proposed, as well as a methodology to incorporate them into a full displacement-based procedure for pre-earthquake and post-earthquake seismic assessment.
Hundreds of children and 12 schools have pre-registered for swimming lessons at Christchurch's new Taiora QE2 sports centre, which opens today. The Canterbury earthquakes damaged the complex beyond repair, and almost six years after it was demolished, a new QE2 has risen from rubble - admittedly smaller and without the athletics track the old one was so well known for. Schools in particular are welcoming today's opening, after having to spend big bucks on transport to get their students to pools for lessons since the quakes. Logan Church reports.
When the 2011 Canterbury earthquakes struck, the region was hit with disaster on an unprecedented scale and the health system was challenged like never before. The injured needed immediate treatment, buildings and equipment were badly damaged, and yet those working in health system rallied to keep it going. Emergency Medicine specialist Dr Mike Ardagh and independent science writer Dr Joanne Deely have written a book, Rising from the Rubble, which tells the stories of those who were part of the health system response, and a record of the long-term issues that have been caused by it.
Christchurch Regeneration Minister Megan Woods says it could take 18 months to decide who is liable for the repairs for 660 home-owners caught in legal limbo. They've bought homes where they thought all the earthquake damage had been repaired - and now find more problems have emerged. Ms Woods told us it's not clear who is liable for these repairs - and it could take as long as 18 months to resolve that basic liability issue. EQC's chief executive Sid Miller has already apologised. He tells Susie Ferguson it's an issue he's been aware of in the year he has been with EQC.
Asset management in power systems is exercised to improve network reliability to provide confidence and security for customers and asset owners. While there are well-established reliability metrics that are used to measure and manage business-as-usual disruptions, an increasing appreciation of the consequences of low-probability high-impact events means that resilience is increasingly being factored into asset management in order to provide robustness and redundancy to components and wider networks. This is particularly important for electricity systems, given that a range of other infrastructure lifelines depend upon their operation. The 2010-2011 Canterbury Earthquake Sequence provides valuable insights into electricity system criticality and resilience in the face of severe earthquake impacts. While above-ground assets are relatively easy to monitor and repair, underground assets such as cables emplaced across wide areas in the distribution network are difficult to monitor, identify faults on, and repair. This study has characterised in detail the impacts to buried electricity cables in Christchurch resulting from seismically-induced ground deformation caused primarily by liquefaction and lateral spread. Primary modes of failure include cable bending, stretching, insulation damage, joint braking and, being pulled off other equipment such as substation connections. Performance and repair data have been compiled into a detailed geospatial database, which in combination with spatial models of peak ground acceleration, peak ground velocity and ground deformation, will be used to establish rigorous relationships between seismicity and performance. These metrics will be used to inform asset owners of network performance in future earthquakes, further assess component criticality, and provide resilience metrics.
Earthquake-triggered soil liquefaction caused extensive damage and heavy economic losses in Christchurch during the 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquakes. The most severe manifestations of liquefaction were associated with the presence of natural deposits of clean sands and silty sands of fluvial origin. However, liquefaction resistance of fines-containing sands is commonly inferred from empirical relationships based on clean sands (i.e. sands with less than 5% fines). Hence, existing evaluation methods have poor accuracy when applied to silty sands. Also, existing methods do not quantify appropriately the influence on liquefaction resistance of soil fabric and structure, which are unique to a specific depositional environment. This study looks at the influence of fines content, soil fabric (i.e. arrangement of soil particles) and structure (e.g. layering, segregation) on the undrained cyclic behaviour and liquefaction resistance of fines-containing sandy soils from Christchurch using Direct Simple Shear (DSS) tests on soil specimens reconstituted in the laboratory with the water sedimentation technique. The poster describes experimental procedures and presents early test results on two sands retrieved at two different sites in Christchurch.
In 1978 world-class motorcycle designer John Britten bought a derelict stable block in Christchurch and painstakingly converted it into a home where he raised his family and built his revolutionary V1000 motorbike. The family continued to live there after his death in 1995, but were forced to abandon it when it sustained serious damage during the 2011 Canterbury earthquakes. After sitting broken and empty for six years, Isabelle Weston, John's eldest daughter, and her husband Tim undertook to restore and revamp the house with a view to running it as a B&B. The story of their epic project features in the first episode of Grand Designs New Zealand series four, which premieres on TV3, on October 3..
This paper explores the scope of small-scale radio to create an auditory geography of place. It focuses on the short term art radio project The Stadium Broadcast, which was staged in November 2014 in an earthquake-damaged sports stadium in Christchurch, New Zealand. Thousands of buildings and homes in Christchurch have been demolished since the Februrary 22, 2011 earthquake, and while Lancaster Park sports stadium is still standing, it has been unused since that date and its future remains uncertain. The Stadium Broadcast constructed a radio memorial to the Park’s 130 year history through archival recordings, the memories of local people, observation of its current state, and a performed site-specificity. The Stadium Broadcast reflected on the spatiality of radio sounds and transmissions, memory, post-disaster transitionality, and the im-permanence of place.
On 14 November 2016, a magnitude (Mw) 7.8 earthquake struck the small coastal settlement of Kaikōura, Aotearoa-New Zealand. With an economy based on tourism, agriculture, and fishing, Kaikōura was immediately faced with significant logistical, economic, and social challenges caused by damage to critical infrastructure and lifelines, essential to its main industries. Massive landslips cut offroad and rail access, stranding hundreds of tourists, and halting the collection, processing and distribution of agricultural products. At the coast, the seabed rose two metres, limiting harbour-access to high tide, with implications for whale watching tours and commercial fisheries. Throughout the region there was significant damage to homes, businesses, and farmland, leaving owners and residents facing an uncertain future. This paper uses qualitative case study analysis to explore post-quake transformations in a rural context. The aim is to gain insight into the distinctive dynamics of disaster response mechanisms, focusing on two initiatives that have emerged in direct response to the disaster. The first examines the ways in which agriculture, food harvesting, production and distribution are being reimagined with the potential to enhance regional food security. The second examines the rescaling of power in decision-making processes following the disaster, specifically examining the ways in which rural actors are leveraging networks to meet their needs and the consequences of that repositioning on rural (and national) governance arrangements. In these and other ways, the local economy is being revitalised, and regional resilience enhanced through diversification, capitalising not on the disaster but the region's natural, social, and cultural capital. Drawing on insights and experience of local stakeholders, policy- and decision-makers, and community representatives we highlight the diverse ways in which these endeavours are an attempt to create something new, revealing also the barriers which needed to be overcome to reshape local livelihoods. Results reveal that the process of transformation as part of rural recovery must be grounded in the lived reality of local residents and their understanding of place, incorporating and building on regional social, environmental, and economic characteristics. In this, the need to respond rapidly to realise opportunities must be balanced with the community-centric approach, with greater recognition given to the contested nature of the decisions to be made. Insights from the case examples can inform preparedness and recovery planning elsewhere, and provide a rich, real-time example of the ways in which disasters can create opportunities for reimagining resilient futures.
Land cover change information in urban areas supports decision makers in dealing with public policy planning and resource management. Remote sensing has been demonstrated as an efficient and accurate way to monitor land cover change over large extents. The Canterbury Earthquake Sequence (CES) caused massive damage in Christchurch, New Zealand and resulted in significant land cover change over a short time period. This study combined two types of remote sensing data, aerial imagery (RGB) and LiDAR, as the basis for quantifying land cover change in Christchurch between 2011 – 2015, a period corresponding to the five years immediately following the 22 February 2011 earthquake, which was part of the CES. An object based image analysis (OBIA) approach was adopted to classify the aerial imagery and LiDAR data into seven land cover types (bare land, building, grass, shadow, tree and water). The OBIA approach consisted of two steps, image segmentation and object classification. For the first step, this study used multi-level segmentation to better segment objects. For the second step, the random forest (RF) classifier was used to assign a land cover type to each object defined by the segmentation. Overall classification accuracies for 2011 and 2015 were 94.0% and 94.32%, respectively. Based on the classification result, land cover changes between 2011 and 2015 were then analysed. Significant increases were found in road and tree cover, while the land cover types that decreased were bare land, grass, roof, water. To better understand the reasons for those changes, land cover transitions were calculated. Canopy growth, seasonal differences and forest plantation establishment were the main reasons for tree cover increase. Redevelopment after the earthquake was the main reason for road area growth. By comparing the spatial distribution of these transitions, this study also identified Halswell and Wigram as the fastest developing suburbs in Christchurch. These results provided quantitative information for the effects of CES, with respect to land cover change. They allow for a better understanding for the current land cover status of Christchurch. Among those land cover changes, the significant increase in tree cover aroused particularly interest as urban forests benefit citizens via ecosystem services, including health, social, economic, and environmental benefits. Therefore, this study firstly calculated the percentages of tree cover in Christchurch’s fifteen wards in order to provide a general idea of tree cover change in the city extent. Following this, an automatic individual tree detection and crown delineation (ITCD) was undertaken to determine the feasibility of automated tree counting. The accuracies of the proposed approach ranged between 56.47% and 92.11% in thirty different sample plots, with an overall accuracy of 75.60%. Such varied accuracies were later found to be caused by the fixed tree detection window size and misclassifications from the land cover classification that affected the boundary of the CHM. Due to the large variability in accuracy, tree counting was not undertaken city-wide for both time periods. However, directions for further study for ITCD in Christchurch could be exploring ITCD approaches with variable window size or optimizing the classification approach to focus more on producing highly accurate CHMs.
The nonlinear dynamic soil-foundation-structure interaction (SFSI) can signifi cantly affect the seismic response of buildings, causing additional deformation modes, damage and repair costs. Because of nonlinear foundation behaviour and interactions, the seismic demand on the superstructure may considerably change, and also permanent deformations at the foundation level may occur. Although SFSI effects may be benefi cial to the superstructure performance, any advantage would be of little structural value unless the phenomenon can be reliably controlled and exploited. Detrimental SFSI effects may also occur, including acceleration and displacement response ampli cation and differential settlements, which would be unconservative to neglect. The lack of proper understanding of the phenomenon and the limited available simpli ed tools accounting for SFSI have been major obstacles to the implementation of integrated design and assessment procedures into the everyday practice. In this study concepts, ideas and practical tools (inelastic spectra) for the seismic design and assessment of integrated foundation-superstructure systems are presented, with the aim to explicitly consider the impact of nonlinearities occurring at the soil-foundation interface on the building response within an integrated approach, where the foundation soil and superstructure are considered as part of an integrated system when evaluating the seismic response, working synergically for the achievement of a target global performance. A conceptual performance-based framework for the seismic design and assessment of integrated foundation-superstructure systems is developed. The framework is based on the use of peak and residual response parameters for both the superstructure and the foundation, which are then combined to produce the system performance matrix. Each performance matrix allows for worsening of the performance when different contributions are combined. An attempt is made to test the framework by using case histories from the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, which are previously shown to have been severely affected by nonlinear SFSI. The application highlights the framework sensitivity to the adopted performance limit states, which must be realistic for a reliable evaluation of the system performance. Constant ductility and constant strength inelastic spectra are generated for nonlinear SFSI systems (SDOF nonlinear superstructure and 3DOF foundation allowing for uplift and soil yielding), representing multistorey RC buildings with shallow rigid foundations supported by cohesive soils. Different ductilities/strengths, hysteretic rules (Bi-linear, Takeda and Flag-Shape), soil stiffness and strength and bearing capacity factors are considered. Footings and raft foundations are investigated, characterized respectively by constant (3 and 8) and typically large bearing capacity factors. It is confi rmed that when SFSI is considered, the superstructure yielding force needed to satisfy a target ductility for a new building changes, and that similarly, for an existing building, the ductility demand on a building of a given strength varies. The extent of change of seismic response with respect to xed-base (FB) conditions depends on the class of soils considered, and on the bearing capacity factor (SF). For SF equal to 3, the stiffer soils enhance the nonlinear rotational foundation behaviour and are associated with reduced settlement, while the softer ones are associated with increased settlement response but not signi ficant rotational behaviour. On average terms, for the simplifi ed models considered, SFSI is found to be bene cial to the superstructure performance in terms of acceleration and superstructure displacement demand, although exceptions are recorded due to ground motion variability. Conversely, in terms of total displacement, a signi cant response increase is observed. The larger the bearing capacity factor, the more the SFSI response approaches the FB system. For raft foundation buildings, characterized by large bearing capacity factors, the impact of foundation response is mostly elastic, and the system on average approaches FB conditions. Well de fined displacement participation factors to the peak total lateral displacement are observed for the different contributions (i.e. peak foundation rotation and translation and superstructure displacement). While the superstructure and foundation rotation show compensating trends, the foundation translation contribution varies as a function of the moment-to-shear ratio, becoming negligible in the medium-to-long periods. The longer the superstructure FB period, the less the foundation response is signifi cant. The larger the excitation level and the less ductile the superstructure, the larger the foundation contribution to the total lateral displacement, and the less the superstructure contribution. In terms of hysteretic behaviour, its impact is larger when the superstructure response is more signifi cant, i.e. for the softer/weaker soils and larger ductilities. Particularly, for the Flag Shape rule, larger superstructure displacement participation factors and smaller foundation contributions are recorded. In terms of residual displacements, the total residual-to-maximum ratios are similar in amplitudes and trends to the corresponding FB system responses, with the foundation and superstructure contributions showing complementary trends. The impact of nonlinear SFSI is especially important for the Flag Shape hysteresis rule, which would not otherwise suffer of any permanent deformations. By using the generated peak and residual inelastic spectra (i.e. inelastic acceleration/ displacement modifi cation factor spectra, and/or participation factor and residual spectra), conceptual simplifi ed procedures for the seismic design and assessment of integrated foundation-superstructure systems are presented. The residual displacements at both the superstructure and foundation levels are explicitly considered. Both the force- and displacement-based approaches are explored. The procedures are de fined to be complementary to the previously proposed integrated performance-based framework. The use of participation factor spectra allows the designer to easily visualize the response of the system components, and could assist the decision making process of both the design and assessment of SFSI systems. The presented numerical results have been obtained using simpli ed models, assuming rigid foundation behaviour and neglecting P-Delta effects. The consideration of more complex systems including asymmetry in stiffness, mass, axial load and ground conditions with a exible foundation layout would highlight detrimental SFSI effects as related to induced differential settlements, while accounting for PDelta effects would further amplify the displacement response. Also, the adopted acceleration records were selected and scaled to match conventional design spectra, thus not representing any response ampli cation in the medium-to-long period range which could as well cause detrimental SFSI effects. While these limitations should be the subject of further research, this study makes a step forward to the understanding of SFSI phenomenon and its incorporation into performance-based design/assessment considerations.