St Johns Church on Hereford Street with damage to the tip of the archway and a red sticker on the door indicating that the building is unsafe to enter. The side of the church has been braced to stabilise the west wall and limit further damage from aftershocks.
A photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "The failed column near the south-east corner of the ground floor of the Hotel Grand Chancellor. This corner of the building slumped 700mm when this column and a nearby sheer wall failed. Scaffolding was erected all around it and then sprayed with concrete to stabilise the building".
A photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "The failed column near the south-east corner of the ground floor of the Hotel Grand Chancellor. This corner of the building slumped 700mm when this column and a nearby sheer wall failed. Scaffolding was erected all around it and then sprayed with concrete to stabilise the building".
One portrait colour digital photograph taken on 25 February 2011 showing a helicopter using a monsoon bucket to wash away unstable rocks from cliffs behind the Lyttelton Container Terminal. One of the immediate priorities in Lyttelton was stabilising the transport routes both from Lyttelton to Christchurch and the port infrastructure so that go...
A video of an interview with Chris Bartholomeusz, Construction Manager at Downer Construction, about the work the team has been doing to stabilise a former quarry on Gleaning Spur. More than 12,000 cubic metres of soil have been removed from the hillside in order to remove a risk of a landslide hitting the houses below.
One landscape colour digital photograph taken on 30 June 2011 showing earthquake damage to a section of retaining wall in Sumner Road. Plastic sheeting installed to stabilise previous damage and protect from water erosion is visible to the right of the photograph. Also visible in the photograph is a boarded up broken window and temporary safety ...
Interagency Emergency Response Teams (IERTs) play acrucial role in times of disasters. Therefore it is crucial to understand more thoroughly the communication roles and responsibilities of interagency team members and to examine how individual members communicate within a complex, evolving, and unstable environment. It is also important to understand how different organisational identities and their spatial geographies contribute to the interactional dynamics. Earthquakes hit the Canterbury region on September, 2010 and then on February 2011 a more devastating shallow earthquake struck resulting in severe damage to the Aged Residential Care (ARC) sector. Over 600 ARC beds were lost and 500 elderly and disabled people were displaced. Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB) set up an interagency emergency response team to address the issues of vulnerable people with significant health and disability needs who were unable to access their normal supports due to the effects of the earthquake. The purpose of this qualitative interpretive study is to focus on the case study of the response and evacuation of vulnerable people by interagencies responding to the event. Staff within these agencies were interviewed with a focus on the critical incidents that either stabilised or negatively influenced the outcome of the response. The findings included the complexity of navigating multiple agencies communication channels; understanding the different hierarchies and communication methods within each agency; data communication challenges when infrastructures were severely damaged; the importance of having the right skills, personal attributes and understanding of the organisations in the response; and the significance of having a liaison in situ representing and communicating through to agencies geographically dispersed from Canterbury. It is hoped that this research will assist in determining a future framework for interagency communication best practice and policy.
The North Canterbury and Marlborough regions of Aotearoa | New Zealand were severely impacted by almost 30,000 landslides triggered during the 2016 Kaikōura Earthquake. Of these landslides approximately 200 dammed rivers. In the study area near Waiau, rupture of The Humps and Leader faults (and associated ground motions) initiated at least 42 co-seismic landslides. The Leader Landslide is the largest of these landslides, with an area of approximately 600,000 m2 and a volume of 6-8 million m3. The landslide buried approximately 980 m of active Leader River bed length and dammed the river. The dam produced four lakes, with two remaining today and two having been breached by partial landslide collapse and knickpoint migration in the year following the earthquake. As of 2025, the landslide dam has not been completely breached and Lake Rebekah remains. The Leader Landslide dam presents a unique opportunity to chart the evolution of the active riverbed pre- and post-earthquake, for up to 2 km downstream of Lake Rebekah. The river’s evolutionary timeline was observed using LiDAR, satellite aerial imagery, and drone surveys from 2001 to 2024 to develop maps and topographic difference models. Key timeframes for riverbed change events were also constrained with information and dated photography gathered from previous communications with the landowners at Woodchester Station, where the landslide is located. Finally, Schmidt Hammer testing of the Pliocene-Miocene Greta Siltstone Formation was conducted to investigate the role of bedrock strength on the rate of riverbed erosion. I present the history of evolution of the Leader River, pre- and post-earthquake, and consider factors impacting riverbed morphology changes. Despite the stability of Lake Rebekah, these data show that the position and morphology of the Leader River has changed significantly in response to the landslide, with the formation of two knickpoint waterfalls up to 14 m-high, four waterbodies, and diversion of the river around the landslide toe. Evolution of the river is characterised by longer periods of stasis (e.g., months to years) punctuated by rapid changes in riverbed morphology (e.g., hours to weeks) associated with incision and aggradation. In particular, the knickpoints migrated upstream at variable spatial and temporal rates. Factors controlling the rates of processes include; rain-storm events, partial lake outburst flooding, spatial changes in Pliocene-Miocene siltstone bed induration and landowner intervention to stabilise the landslide dam. An overarching conclusion of this thesis is that landforms can develop rapidly (i.e., hours to weeks) and in the absence of historical accounts, could be interpreted to have formed over hundreds to thousands of years.