At 12.51pm it will be 10 years since a devastating 6.2 earthquake struck Ōtautahi Christchurch, bringing down buildings and killing 185 people.
A National service will get underway at half-past-12 at the city's Canterbury Earthquake Memorial site, to mark the anniversary.
Maurice Gardiner's sister, Donna Manning, died in the CTV building collapse.
Mr Gardiner told Māni Dunlop that at the Avonhead Cemetery this morning, he and his family joined others who have whānau buried there for a private service, where they remembered those they lost 10 years ago.
It's 10 years since an earthquake killed 185 people in Christchurch. Ports of Auckland workers the latest people to be vaccinated against Covid-19. And Papatoetoe High students are back to school following three community Covid cases at the college.
Nicola Wright has the news.
Monday marks ten years since the Christchurch earthquake shattered New Zealand's second largest city.
One-hundred-and-eighty five people lost their lives when a magnitude 6.2 quake shook the city apart.
David Berry was one of the first responders in the city centre as part of Urban Search and Rescue.
He speaks to Corin Dann.
The Tiwai Point Aluminium Smelter has stockpiled a thousand tonnes of hazardous waste near an eroding beach, A court ruling finds inmates at Auckland Women's Prison were treated in a cruel and degrading manner,We speak to some of those affected by the devastating earthquake that struck Christchurch ten years ago today.
Monday's 10 year anniversary of the devastating earthquake that took the lives of 185 people in Christchurch, will be marked with a special service near the city's earthquake memorial.
Large crowds are expected from half past twelve this afternoon on the lawn just across the river from the memorial wall. Among those speaking is the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern.
A message from former mayor, Sir Bob Parker, will be read out.
Sir Bob, who led the city through one of its most challenging periods, recently suffered a major stroke and heart attack.
The names of the 185 who died will be read before a minute's silence at twelve fifty one, the exact moment the quake struck.
Flowers will then be laid at the memorial wall.
Monday marks a decade since a 6.2 magnitude quake close to the centre of Christchurch killed 185 people. Everybody in the city that day has a story to tell and for many, the memories remain fresh, ten years on. Conan Young has been speaking to some of them.
The Aromaunga Baxters Flowers nursery in Heathcote, Christchurch sits right above the point where the earthquake struck on 22 February 2011. The greenhouses on the steep slopes of the Port Hills, as well as a big old villa and other brick buildings were badly damaged. Ten years on co-owner John Baxter says the earthquake damage is still being repaired, but sales have been boosted by a lack of imported flowers due to Covid-19 restrictions.
As we approach the tenth anniversary of the Christchurch earthquake there are renewed calls for an inquiry into how Southern Response dealt with Canterbury earthquake claimants. Last year the government set up a support package for those who were short changed by Southern Response for their earthquake repairs. It came after a landmark High Court case found Southern Response misled and deceived Karl and Alison Dodds. Insurance claimants advocate, Ali Jones, says ten years on, lessons haven't been learned from how people were treated by Southern Response. She told RNZ reporter Sally Murphy that dealing with them is hell.
RNZ is launching a new podcast today marking the tenth anniversary of Christchurch earthquake.
It's called Fragments: Firsthand accounts of the February 2011 earthquakes.
The podcast features interviews done with quake survivors recorded in the months following the devastating earthquake recorded by locals Julie Hutton and Sandra Close.
RNZ checked in with some of the people Hutton and Close spoke to ten years on from the disaster.
Katy Gosset produced and presented the podcast.
An earlier version of this article failed to reference the work from Julie Hutton and Sandra Close.
Survivors are gathering in Christchurch today to remember those who died in the devastating Christchurch earthquake of 2011.
Of the 185 people who were killed, 115 died when the CTV building collapsed.
Former CTV employee Tom Hawker watched his workplace collapse in front of him.
He speaks to Susie Ferguson.
Christchurch residents will gather today to mark the 10 year anniversary of the Christchurch Earthquake.
Large crowds are expected from half past twelve this afternoon on the lawn just across the river from the memorial wall where a service begin at 12.30.
Among those speaking is the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern. A message from former mayor, Sir Bob Parker, will be also read out.
The names of the 185 who died will be read before a minute's silence at twelve fifty one, the exact moment the quake struck. Flowers will then be laid at the memorial wall.
This is where our coverage began
.A warning this is confronting audio of events that day.
Cantabrians are still surrounded broken buildings and empty spaces on the 10th anniversary of the devastating 22 February 2011 Christchurch earthquake.
The disaster forced 70 percent of the CBD to be demolished.
The Government launched an ambitious recovery plan to help it recover in 2012. The Christchurch Central Recovery Plan, dubbed the "blueprint" would dictate the rebuild of the central city.
To support it, the Government would complete a series of "anchor projects", to encourage investment in the city and make it a more attractive place to live in.
As Anan Zaki reports, the anchor projects appeared to weigh down the progress of the rebuild.
Christchurch residents will gather today to mark the tenth anniversary of the Christchurch Earthquake.
The 6.2 magnitude quake killed 185 people and caused widespread destruction across the city.
It hit at 12.51pm while many people were in the city centre, working, shopping or enjoying their lunch in the sunshine. This is where our coverage began.
A warning this is confronting audio of events that day.
A prominent Christchurch property investor says the Government's anchor projects meant to help rebuild the city faster, has instead slowed it down.
After the 2011 earthquake, the Government launched a recovery plan for the CBD, which had 16 anchor projects designed to spur on the rebuild.
However, many have been plagued by delays and are still unfinished.
Property investor Antony Gough told RNZ reporter Anan Zaki that unlike the Government, it was the private sector which ploughed ahead with the rebuild.
After a day of remembering the terrible events of 10 years ago, Christchurch got to celebrate last night with an international T20 match between the Black Caps and Australia. It was the first international match played under lights in the city since the earthquake. Conan Young headed along to Hagley Oval where a sold out crowd was treated to some champagne cricket.
A protest is underway outside insurance company Vero's Christchurch's office, with building owners dismayed to be still fighting for earthquake repairs 10 years on.
The protest was organised by the owners of an 11 unit apartment block in New Brighton, who says Vero is purposefully delaying progress to wear them down.
RNZ's reporter Rachel Graham is at the protest and spoke to Meriana Johnsen
Christchurch is still struggling 10 years on from the earthquake with vacant spaces and little development.
In the surrounding areas of Christchurch in Selwyn, inland and in the Waimakariri District to the north it's boom times, with the councils unable to keep up with building consents.
The regions have continued to grow over the last 10 years after people initially moved there after the earthquake to escape the bumpy roads, red zones and EQC battles.
RNZ's Sally Murphy reports.
A new research project will study the ongoing impact of "quake brain" on people's memory and other cognitive functions a decade after the Canterbury earthquakes; a Masterton print business that can't find a way to recycle its plastic waste has highlighted a national problem; a programme offering free period products for all school students is to be rolled out nationwide from June; and why don't we eat possum?
As Christchurch prepares to mark 10 years since its deadly earthquake, the impact of that day continues to be felt differently. The less affluent eastern suburbs, which bore the brunt of the damage, continue to lag behind the rest of the city in their recovery. The former dean of Christchurch and fellow east sider, Peter Beck, told Conan Young that while government agencies such as EQC often failed people in their hour of need, what did not fail was the willingness of people to help out their neighbours.
The National Party wants to force councils to free up land for development in a bid to get more houses built.
The party's proposal would give the government emergency powers modelled on those used to speed up house building in Canterbury following the earthquakes in 2010 and 2011.
Party leader Judith Collins spoke to Corin Dann.
There's growing frustration over the government's work to match it's promise to tackle the country's suicide rates. A Mental Health Commission report describes frustration over the pace of change - and points to an urgent need for an overarching action plan. Mental health advocates are also criticising the lack of progress in helping people in Canterbury, with many still severely affected by ongoing trauma from earthquakes and the 2019 Mosque shootings. Eleisha Foon reports.
Urban forager and food writer, Liv Sisson finds all sorts of tasty treats in the Otautahi city centre.With some of the housing and buildings destroyed in the earthquakes, a rewilding has taken place providing a range of edible plants. Liv Sisson gathers produce thriving on berms and near the Avon River.
New Zealanders are paying too much for house and contents insurance, according to a new survey. Consumer NZ's price comparison survey shows climate and natural hazard risk is being factored in, and is more expensive than ever. Quotes for a large house differed by more than $3,000 across Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin, and there's a more than $2,000 difference between the cheapest and most expensive policies on offer for a standard-sized house. If you live somewhere with a higher chance of earthquakes - such as Wellington or Christchurch - you'll be charged more for insurance. The cost of house and contents insurance has risen by 5.6% this year, over the past ten years it's gone up 150%. Kathryn is joined by Consumer NZ's Gemma Rasmussen and Katrina Shanks Chief Executive of Financial Advice New Zealand, which represents independent and professional financial advisors.
Christchurch artist Mike Beer creates miniature models of Christchurch buildings that were lost in the Canterbury earthquakes. Through these tiny models Mike hopes to remind people of the buildings that once shaped the city - and bring back the feelings and memories associated with them. Mike, who goes by the name Ghostcat, says It's all about the connections people have with a time, and place. His models are to be displayed at Fiksate Gallery in Christchuch from April 9.
A frantic rewrite was required during the lockdown last year by novellist Janna Ruth, who'd set her novel Time to remember in Christchurch throughout 2020. The book's characters are mainly preoccupied by the 10th anniversary of the September 2010 Canterbury earthquake, but Janna knew she needed to include the pandemic once it took hold. But in fact she'd started working on the novel back in 2005, well before both traumatic events. Janna came to New Zealand from Germany to study geology, and she uses some of her memories from her university years in Time to remember. In it a group of university students bond and bicker, some of them still scarred by the earthquake a decade earlier.
The David and Goliath battle over a heritage building sitting in the way of a planned $473 million dollar, multi-use arena for Christchurch has ended up in court. The 25,000-seated, roofed arena is the final anchor project for the Christchurch rebuild and will be designed to host everything from All Blacks tests to big concerts. But sitting on the edge of the site, at 212 Madras Street, is the NG Building, a 115-year old warehouse that's home to a number of creative businesses. It escaped the worst of the 2011 earthquake and was strengthened by its owners: Roland Logan and Sharon Ng. They say they were told in 2013 the building could be incorporated into the arena's design, and are at loggerheads over its compulsory acquisition. Last week they were at the High Court seeking an injunction that would allow them to temporarily maintain ownership of the building, and that decision was released yesterday - and upheld. Roland joins Kathryn to discuss why they hope the building can be saved.
Today RNZ's Midday supervising producer, Denise Garland, looks at two brand new podcasts. Collapse is a podcast from Stuff, all about the Christchurch earthquakes in the lead up the to 10th anniversary of the devastating quake on February 22nd. She also looks at NZ Wars - Stories of Tainui from RNZ which over the three episodes covers the war of Waikato in the 1860s, the great war for New Zealand, a defining conflict of New Zealand.
As damage and loss caused by natural hazards have increased worldwide over the past several decades, it is important for governments and aid agencies to have tools that enable effective post-disaster livelihood recovery to create self-sufficiency for the affected population. This study introduces a framework of critical components that constitute livelihood recovery and the critical factors that lead to people’s livelihood recovery. A comparative case study is employed in this research, combined with questionnaire surveys and interviews with those communities affected by large earthquakes in Lushan, China and in Christchurch and Kaikōura, New Zealand. In Lushan, China, a framework with four livelihood components was established, namely, housing, employment, wellbeing and external assistance. Respondents considered recovery of their housing to be the most essential element for livelihood diversification. External assistance was also rated highly in assisting with their livelihood recovery. Family ties and social connections seemed to have played a larger role than that of government agencies and NGOs. However, the recovery of livelihood cannot be fully achieved without wellbeing aspects being taken into account, and people believed that quality of life and their physical and mental health were essential for livelihood restoration. In Christchurch, New Zealand, the identified livelihood components were validated through in-depth interviews. The results showed that the above framework presenting what constitutes successful livelihood recovery could also be applied in Christchurch. This study also identified the critical factors to affect livelihood recovery following the Lushan and Kaikōura earthquakes, and these include community safety, availability of family support, level of community cohesion, long-term livelihood support, external housing recovery support, level of housing recovery and availability of health and wellbeing support. The framework developed will provide guidance for policy makers and aid agencies to prioritise their strategies and initiatives in assisting people to reinstate their livelihood in a timely manner post-disaster. It will also assist the policy makers and practitioners in China and New Zealand by setting an agenda for preparing for livelihood recovery in non-urgent times so the economic impact and livelihood disruption of those affected can be effectively mitigated.
The recent instances of seismic activity in Canterbury (2010/11) and Kaikōura (2016) in New Zealand have exposed an unexpected level of damage to non-structural components, such as buried pipelines and building envelope systems. The cost of broken buried infrastructure, such as pipeline systems, to the Christchurch Council was excessive, as was the cost of repairing building envelopes to building owners in both Christchurch and Wellington (due to the Kaikōura earthquake), which indicates there are problems with compliance pathways for both of these systems. Councils rely on product testing and robust engineering design practices to provide compliance certification on the suitability of product systems, while asset and building owners rely on the compliance as proof of an acceptable design. In addition, forensic engineers and lifeline analysts rely on the same product testing and design techniques to analyse earthquake-related failures or predict future outcomes pre-earthquake, respectively. The aim of this research was to record the actual field-observed damage from the Canterbury and Kaikōura earthquakes of seismic damage to buried pipeline and building envelope systems, develop suitable testing protocols to be able to test the systems’ seismic resilience, and produce prediction design tools that deliver results that reflect the collected field observations with better accuracy than the present tools used by forensic engineers and lifeline analysts. The main research chapters of this thesis comprise of four publications that describe the gathering of seismic damage to pipes (Publication 1 of 4) and building envelopes (Publication 2 of 4). Experimental testing and the development of prediction design tools for both systems are described in Publications 3 and 4. The field observation (discussed in Publication 1 of 4) revealed that segmented pipe joints, such as those used in thick-walled PVC pipes, were particularly unsatisfactory with respect to the joint’s seismic resilience capabilities. Once the joint was damaged, silt and other deleterious material were able to penetrate the pipeline, causing blockages and the shutdown of key infrastructure services. At present, the governing Standards for PVC pipes are AS/NZS 1477 (pressure systems) and AS/NZS 1260 (gravity systems), which do not include a protocol for evaluating the PVC pipes for joint seismic resilience. Testing methodologies were designed to test a PVC pipe joint under various different simultaneously applied axial and transverse loads (discussed in Publication 3 of 4). The goal of the laboratory experiment was to establish an easy to apply testing protocol that could fill the void in the mentioned standards and produce boundary data that could be used to develop a design tool that could predict the observed failures given site-specific conditions surrounding the pipe. A tremendous amount of building envelope glazing system damage was recorded in the CBDs of both Christchurch and Wellington, which included gasket dislodgement, cracked glazing, and dislodged glazing. The observational research (Publication 2 of 4) concluded that the glazing systems were a good indication of building envelope damage as the glazing had consistent breaking characteristics, like a ballistic fuse used in forensic blast analysis. The compliance testing protocol recognised in the New Zealand Building Code, Verification Method E2/VM1, relies on the testing method from the Standard AS/NZS 4284 and stipulates the inclusion of typical penetrations, such as glazing systems, to be included in the test specimen. Some of the building envelope systems that failed in the recent New Zealand earthquakes were assessed with glazing systems using either the AS/NZS 4284 or E2/VM1 methods and still failed unexpectedly, which suggests that improvements to the testing protocols are required. An experiment was designed to mimic the observed earthquake damage using bi-directional loading (discussed in Publication 4 of 4) and to identify improvements to the current testing protocol. In a similar way to pipes, the observational and test data was then used to develop a design prediction tool. For both pipes (Publication 3 of 4) and glazing systems (Publication 4 of 4), experimentation suggests that modifying the existing testing Standards would yield more realistic earthquake damage results. The research indicates that including a specific joint testing regime for pipes and positioning the glazing system in a specific location in the specimen would improve the relevant Standards with respect to seismic resilience of these systems. Improving seismic resilience in pipe joints and glazing systems would improve existing Council compliance pathways, which would potentially reduce the liability of damage claims against the government after an earthquake event. The developed design prediction tool, for both pipe and glazing systems, uses local data specific to the system being scrutinised, such as local geology, dimensional characteristics of the system, actual or predicted peak ground accelerations (both vertically and horizontally) and results of product-specific bi-directional testing. The design prediction tools would improve the accuracy of existing techniques used by forensic engineers examining the cause of failure after an earthquake and for lifeline analysts examining predictive earthquake damage scenarios.
This thesis presents the application of data science techniques, especially machine learning, for the development of seismic damage and loss prediction models for residential buildings. Current post-earthquake building damage evaluation forms are developed for a particular country in mind. The lack of consistency hinders the comparison of building damage between different regions. A new paper form has been developed to address the need for a global universal methodology for post-earthquake building damage assessment. The form was successfully trialled in the street ‘La Morena’ in Mexico City following the 2017 Puebla earthquake. Aside from developing a framework for better input data for performance based earthquake engineering, this project also extended current techniques to derive insights from post-earthquake observations. Machine learning (ML) was applied to seismic damage data of residential buildings in Mexico City following the 2017 Puebla earthquake and in Christchurch following the 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence (CES). The experience showcased that it is readily possible to develop empirical data only driven models that can successfully identify key damage drivers and hidden underlying correlations without prior engineering knowledge. With adequate maintenance, such models have the potential to be rapidly and easily updated to allow improved damage and loss prediction accuracy and greater ability for models to be generalised. For ML models developed for the key events of the CES, the model trained using data from the 22 February 2011 event generalised the best for loss prediction. This is thought to be because of the large number of instances available for this event and the relatively limited class imbalance between the categories of the target attribute. For the CES, ML highlighted the importance of peak ground acceleration (PGA), building age, building size, liquefaction occurrence, and soil conditions as main factors which affected the losses in residential buildings in Christchurch. ML also highlighted the influence of liquefaction on the buildings losses related to the 22 February 2011 event. Further to the ML model development, the application of post-hoc methodologies was shown to be an effective way to derive insights for ML algorithms that are not intrinsically interpretable. Overall, these provide a basis for the development of ‘greybox’ ML models.
