For the latest on the damage caused by Monday's earthquakes, we're joined by the Christchurch City Council's water and waste unit manager, Mark Christison.
Photograph captioned by Fairfax, "Mark Christison, CCC's Water and Waste Unit Manager, in the earthquake-damaged water pumping station on the corner of New Brighton Road and Palmers Road".
Photograph captioned by Fairfax, "Mark Christison, CCC's Water and Waste Unit Manager, in the earthquake-damaged water pumping station on the corner of New Brighton Road and Palmers Road".
Photograph captioned by Fairfax, "Mark Christison, CCC's Water and Waste Unit Manager, in the earthquake-damaged water pumping station on the corner of New Brighton Road and Palmers Road".
A photograph of a pile of rubble on the side of a residential road in Christchurch. The material has been removed from a property and placed on the road for the Christchurch City Council to collect.
A photograph of a make-shift toilet in the Christchurch Art Gallery. A sign behind it reads, "Portaloos Department. We know that 80,000 people need loos. We have 900-1800 available or coming, We don't need to be told people need loos. Thank you. We're number one with your number twos!". Signs below this read, "Toilet Occupied", "Toilet Vacant" and, "In Tray". The Art Gallery was used as the temporary headquarters for Civil Defence after the 22 February 2011 earthquake.
A photograph of a portaloo outside a residential property in Christchurch. After the 22 February 2011 earthquake, many houses had no running water and were forced to use chemical toilets or portaloos placed along the street. There is flooding and liquefaction on the street in the foreground. Liquefaction silt has been piled on the side of the road and a road cone placed in front.
A photograph of a pile of liquefaction and other rubble on the side of a residential road in Christchurch. The material has been removed from a property and placed on the road for the Christchurch City Council to collect. A road cone has been placed next to the pile to warn road users of its presence.
A piece of decorated furniture in the Words of Hope project. Messages can be seen, such as "Don't waste this chance Chch" and "CCC Councillors and CERA: Please please please open your minds and do things differently - what you do here will last generations - make a positive change".
Topics - New Zealanders paid tribute to the victims of the Christchurch earthquake today - with two minutes' silence marking the moment the disaster struck last week. The emergency ambulance service provider, St John, has hit out at hoax callers who have been wasting valuable time and ambulance service resources following Tuesday's earthquake.
A mural on the exposed wall of a building on Peterborough Street. This was a joint project between Gap Filler and the Flying Cup Cafe. The mural is a beach scene with a quote from Anne Frank, reading, "Isn't it wonderful that nobody need waste a single moment to improve the world", and incorporates pre-existing street art and posters.
Disaster recovery is significantly affected by funding availability. The timeliness and quality of recovery activities are not only impacted by the extent of the funding but also the mechanisms with which funding is prioritised, allocated and delivered. This research addresses the impact of funding mechanisms on the effectiveness and efficiency of post-disaster demolition and debris management programmes. A qualitative assessment of the impacts on recovery of different funding sources and mechanisms was carried out, using the 2010 Canterbury Earthquake as well as other recent international events as case studies. The impacts assessed include: timeliness, completeness, environmental, economic and social impacts. Of the case studies investigated, the Canterbury Earthquake was the only disaster response to rely solely on a privatised approach to insurance for debris management. Due to the low level of resident displacement and low level of hazard in the waste, this was a satisfactory approach, though not ideal. This approach has led to greater organisational complexity and delays. For many other events, the potential community wide impacts caused by the prolonged presence of disaster debris means that publicly funded and centrally facilitated programmes appear to be the most common and effective method of managing disaster waste.
The extent of liquefaction in the eastern suburbs of Christchurch (Aranui, Bexley, Avonside, Avonhead and Dallington) from the February 22 2011 Earthquake resulted in extensive damage to in-ground waste water pipe systems. This caused a huge demand for portable toilets (or port-a-loos) and companies were importing them from outside Canterbury and in some instances from Australia. However, because they were deemed “assets of importance” under legislation, their allocation had to be coordinated by Civil Defence and Emergency Management (CDEM). Consequently, companies supplying them had to ignore requests from residents, businesses and rest homes; and commitments to large events outside of the city such as the Hamilton 400 V8 Supercars and the Pasifika Festival in Auckland were impacted. Frustrations started to show as neighbourhoods questioned the equity of the port-a-loos distribution. The Prime Minister was reported as reassuring citizens in the eastern suburbs in the first week of March that1 “a report about the distribution of port-a-loos and chemical toilets shows allocation has been fair. Key said he has asked Civil Defence about the distribution process and where the toilets been sent. He said there aren’t enough for the scale of the event but that is quickly being rectified and the need for toilets is being reassessed all the time.” Nonetheless, there still remained a deep sense of frustration and exclusion over the equity of the port-a-loos distribution. This study took the simple approach of mapping where those port-a-loos were on 11-12 March for several areas in the eastern suburbs and this suggested that their distribution was not equitable and was not well done. It reviews the predictive tools available for estimating damage to waste water pipes and asks the question could this situation have been better planned so that pot-a-loo locations could have been better prioritised? And finally it reviews the integral roles of communication and monitoring as part of disaster management strategy. The impression from this study is that other New Zealand urban centres could or would also be at risk and that work is need to developed more rational management approaches for disaster planning.