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Articles, UC QuakeStudies

A plan which outlines the processes and IT applications and services required to manage the SCIRT programme. The first version of this plan was produced on 9 August 2011.

Articles, UC QuakeStudies

A plan which outlines the function, roles and responsibilities of SCIRT during an emergency event affecting SCIRT construction works. The first version of this plan was produced on 30 April 2012. Note that personal details of key personnel have been removed from this document.

Research papers, University of Canterbury Library

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.

Videos, UC QuakeStudies

A video of a presentation by Ian Campbell, Executive General Manager of the Stronger Christchurch Rebuild Team (SCIRT), during the third plenary of the 2016 People in Disasters Conference. The presentation is titled, "Putting People at the Heart of the Rebuild".The abstract for this presentation reads: On the face of it, the Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team (SCIRT) is an organisation created to engineer and carry out approximately $2B of repairs to physical infrastructure over a 5-year period. Our workforce consists primarily of engineers and constructors who came from far and wide after the earthquakes to 'help fix Christchurch'. But it was not the technical challenges that drew them all here. It was the desire and ambition expressed in the SCIRT 'what we are here for' statement: 'to create resilient infrastructure that gives people security and confidence in the future of Christchurch'. For the team at SCIRT, people are at the heart of our rebuild programme. This is recognised in the intentional approach SCIRT takes to all aspects of its work. The presentation will touch upon how SCIRT communicated with communities affected by our work and how we planned and coordinated the programme to minimise the impacts, while maximising the value for both the affected communities and the taxpayers of New Zealand and rate payers of Christchurch funding it. The presentation will outline SCIRT's very intentional approach to supporting, developing, connecting, and enabling our people to perform, individually, and collectively, in the service of providing the best outcome for the people of Christchurch and New Zealand.

Videos, UC QuakeStudies

A video of the keynote-presentation by Dr Jeanne LeBlanc, Registered Psychologist, during the second plenary of the 2016 People in Disasters Conference. LeBlanc is a Registered Psychologist, specialising in Clinical Neuropsychology and Rehabilitation. She is the British Columbia Psychological Association (BCPA) Representative for the American Psychological Associate State, Territorial and Provincial Disaster Response Network, and has also been appointed as the Behavioural Health Liaison to the American Board of Disaster Medicine. The presentation is titled, "Machetes and Breadfruit: Medical disaster response challenges in unstable settings".The abstract for this presentation reads as follows: The January 2010 earthquake in Haiti resulted in a massive response to a setting which was already fraught with danger, causing a number of personal, logistical, and safety challenges to responding medical teams. This presentation will provide a first-person account of this experience from the perspective of a behavioural health professional, whose responsibility was both the overall emotional wellbeing of the medical responders, as well as those impacted by the quake. Unique 'lessons learned' by these response teams will be highlighted, and recommendations will be provided for responders considering deploying to future events in highly unstable areas.

Audio, Radio New Zealand

What the Panelists Finlay MacDonald and Peter Fa'afiu have been up to. The Reserve Bank has cut the Official Cash Rate to a record low 2%. Another book about retired All Blacks captain Richie McCaw has come out. The NZ Sevens rugby team is now officially out of medal contention. Are people all that interested in the Olympic games? Fairfax and Sky TV are in court over copyright issues. Christchurch City Councillor Ali Jones talks about what the cull of EQC staff will mean for life in the post-earthquake city.

Videos, UC QuakeStudies

A video of a presentation by Matthew Pratt during the Resilience and Response Stream of the 2016 People in Disasters Conference. The presentation is titled, "Investing in Connectedness: Building social capital to save lives and aid recovery".The abstract for this presentation reads as follows: Traditionally experts have developed plans to prepare communities for disasters. This presentation discusses the importance of relationship-building and social capital in building resilient communities that are both 'prepared' to respond to disaster events, and 'enabled' to lead their own recovery. As a member of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority's Community Resilience Team, I will present the work I undertook to catalyse community recovery. I will draw from case studies of initiatives that have built community connectedness, community capacity, and provided new opportunities for social cohesion and neighbourhood planning. I will compare three case studies that highlight how social capital can aid recovery. Investment in relationships is crucial to aid preparedness and recovery.

Videos, UC QuakeStudies

A video of a presentation by Thomas Petschner during the Resilience and Response Stream of the 2016 People in Disasters Conference. The presentation is titled, "Medical Clowning in Disaster Zones".The abstract for this presentation reads as follows: To be in a crisis caused by different kinds of natural disasters (as well as a man made incidents), dealing with ongoing increase of problems and frequent confrontation with very bad news isn't something that many people can easily cope with. This applies obviously to affected people but also to the members of SAR teams, doctors in the field and the experienced humanitarians too. The appropriate use of humour in crisis situations and dis-functional environments is a great tool to make those difficult moments more bearable for everyone. It helps injured and traumatised people cope with what they're facing, and can help them to recover more quickly too. At the same time humorous thinking can help to solve some of the complex problems emergency responders face. This is in addition to emergency and medical only reactions - allowing for a more holistic human perspective, which can provide a positive lasting effect. The ability to laugh is hardwired into our systems bringing a huge variety of physical, mental and social benefits. Even a simple smile can cultivate optimism and hope, while laughter can boost a hormone cocktail - which helps to cope with pain, enhance the immune system, reduce stress, re-focus, connect and unite people during difficult times. Humour as an element of psychological response in crisis situations is increasingly understood in a much wider sense: as the human capacity to plan and achieve desired outcomes with less stress, thus resulting in more 'predictable' work in unpredictable situations. So, if we approach certain problems in the same way Medical Clowns do, we may find a more positive solution. Everyone knows that laughter is an essential component of a healthy, happy life. The delivery of 'permission to laugh' into disaster zones makes a big difference to the quality of life for everyone, even if it's for a very short, but important period of time. And it's crucial to get it right as there is no second chance for the first response.

Research papers, University of Canterbury Library

Sewerage systems convey sewage, or wastewater, from residential or commercial buildings through complex reticulation networks to treatment plants. During seismic events both transient ground motion and permanent ground deformation can induce physical damage to sewerage system components, limiting or impeding the operability of the whole system. The malfunction of municipal sewerage systems can result in the pollution of nearby waterways through discharge of untreated sewage, pose a public health threat by preventing the use of appropriate sanitation facilities, and cause serious inconvenience for rescuers and residents. Christchurch, the second largest city in New Zealand, was seriously affected by the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence (CES) in 2010-2011. The CES imposed widespread damage to the Christchurch sewerage system (CSS), causing a significant loss of functionality and serviceability to the system. The Christchurch City Council (CCC) relied heavily on temporary sewerage services for several months following the CES. The temporary services were supported by use of chemical and portable toilets to supplement the damaged wastewater system. The rebuild delivery agency -Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team (SCIRT) was created to be responsible for repair of 85 % of the damaged horizontal infrastructure (i.e., water, wastewater, stormwater systems, and roads) in Christchurch. Numerous initiatives to create platforms/tools aiming to, on the one hand, support the understanding, management and mitigation of seismic risk for infrastructure prior to disasters, and on the other hand, to support the decision-making for post-disaster reconstruction and recovery, have been promoted worldwide. Despite this, the CES in New Zealand highlighted that none of the existing platforms/tools are either accessible and/or readable or usable by emergency managers and decision makers for restoring the CSS. Furthermore, the majority of existing tools have a sole focus on the engineering perspective, while the holistic process of formulating recovery decisions is based on system-wide approach, where a variety of factors in addition to technical considerations are involved. Lastly, there is a paucity of studies focused on the tools and frameworks for supporting decision-making specifically on sewerage system restoration after earthquakes. This thesis develops a decision support framework for sewerage pipe and system restoration after earthquakes, building on the experience and learning of the organisations involved in recovering the CSS following the CES in 2010-2011. The proposed decision support framework includes three modules: 1) Physical Damage Module (PDM); 2) Functional Impact Module (FIM); 3) Pipeline Restoration Module (PRM). The PDM provides seismic fragility matrices and functions for sewer gravity and pressure pipelines for predicting earthquake-induced physical damage, categorised by pipe materials and liquefaction zones. The FIM demonstrates a set of performance indicators that are categorised in five domains: structural, hydraulic, environmental, social and economic domains. These performance indicators are used to assess loss of wastewater system service and the induced functional impacts in three different phases: emergency response, short-term recovery and long-term restoration. Based on the knowledge of the physical and functional status-quo of the sewerage systems post-earthquake captured through the PDM and FIM, the PRM estimates restoration time of sewer networks by use of restoration models developed using a Random Forest technique and graphically represented in terms of restoration curves. The development of a decision support framework for sewer recovery after earthquakes enables decision makers to assess physical damage, evaluate functional impacts relating to hydraulic, environmental, structural, economic and social contexts, and to predict restoration time of sewerage systems. Furthermore, the decision support framework can be potentially employed to underpin system maintenance and upgrade by guiding system rehabilitation and to monitor system behaviours during business-as-usual time. In conjunction with expert judgement and best practices, this framework can be moreover applied to assist asset managers in targeting the inclusion of system resilience as part of asset maintenance programmes.