Members of the University of Canterbury's E-Learning team Jess Hollis, Paul Nicholls, Lei Zhang, and Susan Tull in their temporary office in the James Hight building. The photographer comments, "First looks at our new temporary (maybe) office space. Our group will stay here until April or May 2011, then will move to another floor in the Central Library. Moving day - collecting new keys. Lei, Paul, Susan, Jess".
The University of Canterbury's E-Learning team's temporary office in the James Hight building. The photographer comments, "First looks at our new temporary (maybe) office space. Our group will stay here until April or May 2011, then will move to another floor in the Central Library. Common area. More offices run along the north wall at the left. Through the doors are the male toilets and a stair well".
The University of Canterbury's E-Learning team's temporary office in the James Hight building. The photographer comments, "First looks at our new temporary (maybe) office space. Our group will stay here until April or May 2011, then will move to another floor in the Central Library. Common area. How will we make use of this large open area? Our offices are behind the glass wall, facing south".
The September Canterbury earthquake. These pictures were taken of Colombo Street in Sydenham. A lot of masonry in this area has been damaged/fallen down. Angus Donaldson copy service. This has moved down the road on Colombo Street. It is now sharing the premises with Penny Lane Records. Note: these photos were taken on a cellphone; mind the qu...
Members of the University of Canterbury's E-Learning team Lei Zhang and Jess Hollis in their temporary office in the University Printery building. The photographer comments, "The University restarts its teaching, and the techies in e-learning move out of NZi3. Our end of the temporary office; Lei, my desk in the corner, Jess in the other corner (with a window to the admin/reception desk between us), Paul's desk right foreground. (He's home with a cold.)
Caption reads: "I lived in London all through the Blitz, you get used to these things. Living here after the earthquakes didn’t bother me. I had a small battery operated radio and the neighbour lent me her generator. Initially I used it to run the fridge but after a while I couldn’t get it started. I don’t want to move, to be quite honest. There’s nothing that will be able to replace the life I built here."
Members of the University of Canterbury's E-Learning team admire the view from their temporary office in the James Hight building. The photographer comments, "First looks at our new temporary (maybe) office space. Our group will stay here until April or May 2011, then will move to another floor in the Central Library. South window of our office. Our view looks out to the Port Hills and around to the south west, towards Halswell and Lincoln".
The University of Canterbury's E-Learning team's temporary office in the James Hight building. The photographer comments, "First looks at our new temporary (maybe) office space. Our group will stay here until April or May 2011, then will move to another floor in the Central Library. Foyer lifts etc. Female toilets are off the foyer to the left. These lifts start at Level 2 of the Library, and are heavily used by students. (Once the building is repaired after the earthquake; several floors are still in a mess)".
Detail of damage to a house in Richmond. A double-brick wall has collapsed. A wire loop which formerly tied the two layers of bricks together has pulled out from one of the layers, showing how the two parts of the wall moved apart during the shaking. The photographer comments, "These photos show our old house in River Rd and recovery work around Richmond and St Albans. The remaining double brick by the back door has been further smashed and twisted".
Part three of the audio that makes up Gap Filler's 29th project, the Transitional City Audio Tour. This part of the tour begins on Madras Street and includes commentary on the clothing industry in Christchurch before reaching Tuam Street. On Tuam Street, the tour includes commentary on the C1 cafe in the former Post Office building. The tour then moves up High Street to Cashel Street and on to Re:Start Mall.
A view of the ICTS building at the University of Canterbury, seen from level 7 of the James Hight building. The photographer comments, "First looks at our new temporary (maybe) office space. Our group will stay here until April or May 2011, then will move to another floor in the Central Library. We look down on the IT Building, which is doomed. The ugly draughty IT building is going to be demolished in the next campus revamp. The 'Butterfly Building' behind, originally the mainframe computer centre, will remain, as it's architecturally significant, apparently".
Alan Hoskin, a member of the University of Canterbury's E-Learning team, in their temporary office in the James Hight building. The photographer comments, "First looks at our new temporary (maybe) office space. Our group will stay here until April or May 2011, then will move to another floor in the Central Library. 700 hall with Alan. The corridor has a small seminar room at the end, and our offices on the right. To the left is the open sitting and reception area; we're trying to think of ways to make use of this".
A sewage pumping station on Avonside Drive has been lifted out of the ground by liquefaction. In the background, the damaged Snell Place footbridge over the Avon River is closed off with cordon fencing. The photographer comments, "A Sunday afternoon ride to New Brighton, then back via Aranui, Wainoni, Dallington, and Richmond. Not a cheerful experience. Dallington footbridge. The two pieces of this foot bridge have moved towards each other, so the bridge has developed quite a peak. The sewage pumping station has been heaved out of the ground by hydraulic pressure during quakes".
A PDF copy of four hoarding designs for Christchurch Hospital. The images read, "Noticed anything awesome lately? Heads up... a helipad is coming!", "Good things are happening here. A new Emergency Department is on its way", "Moving your body can move your mood. Making you strong inside and out - just like our new buildings!" and "What could you do to recharge? Connecting with others can be a real pick-me-up whether you're at work or enjoying a well-earned catch up".
The University of Canterbury's E-Learning team's temporary office in the James Hight building. The photographer comments, "First looks at our new temporary (maybe) office space. Our group will stay here until April or May 2011, then will move to another floor in the Central Library. My desk. I hope to get blinds to cover this internal window. Later - blinds are not allowed, so I rotated the desk 180 degrees. My back is now facing the window, but I'm far enough away that people won't be able to read my screens - and I don't have to look at people looking at me".
A photograph of a sign in the window of a café in Merivale. The sign reads, "To all my very loyal customers, thank you so much for your custom over the past three years. As much as I have enjoyed the previous three years it is time for me to move on especially to spend more time with my two young daughters. On a brighter note, Paul from Chicotis (198 Papanui Road) - I'm sure most of you will already know him - will be taking over very soon and will continue to trade as Chicotis. I wish Paul all the very best and thank you again for your support of Makibo Cafe.
Part one of the audio that makes up Gap Filler's 29th project, the Transitional City Audio Tour. This part of the tour begins at the Pallet Pavilion on the corner of Kilmore and Durham Streets. It includes commentary on the Crowne Plaza Hotel and the Town Hall, as well as the Captain Cook and Queen Victoria statues in Victoria Square. The tour then moves down Armagh Street to New Regent Street where there is a discussion of Trambiance, a series of sound performances in the Christchurch tram. The tour also includes commentary on the rebuild of New Regent Street and the Isaac Theatre Royal.
A poster created by Empowered Christchurch to advertise their submission to the CERA Draft Transition Recovery Plan on social media.The poster reads, "Submission. CERA Draft Transition Recovery Plan. After nearly five years of 'Emergency Response' where sustainability has been sacrificed in the interests of speed, we can assume that this phase is now behind us. We see no reason why this period should be extended until April 2016. Lessons must be learned from the past. It is time to move into the 'Restoration Phase'. Once seismic and building standards are corrected, and risks are notified, mapped and accepted, sustainability will be ensures. We need a city that is driven by the people that live in it, and enabled by a bureaucracy that accepts and mitigates risks, rather than transferring them to the most vulnerable residents. We support option 3+."
Part five of the audio that makes up Gap Filler's 29th project, the Transitional City Audio Tour. This part of the tour begins on Montreal Street near Cranmer Square. It includes commentary on the Cranmer Centre and the Windsor Hotel, two demolished buildings which were on the opposite corners of Armagh and Montreal Streets. The tour then moves down Armagh Street, providing commentary on the Canterbury Provincial Chambers Buildings. When the tour reaches the bridge over the Avon River, it crosses to the other side and follows the river to Gloucester Street where there is commentary on Chancery Lane. The tour then travels up Colombo Street and back to Victoria Square, with commentary on the Queen Victoria and James Cook statues. The tour finishes at the Pallet Pavilion, where it began, on the corner of Kilmore and Durham Streets.
Imagined landscapes find their form in utopian dreaming. As ideal places, utopias are set up according to the ideals of their designers. Inevitably, utopias become compromised when they move from the imaginary into the actual. Opportunities to create utopias rely largely on a blank slate, a landscape unimpeded by the inconveniences of existing occupation – or even topography. Christchurch has seen two utopian moments. The first was at the time of European settlement in the mid-nineteenth century, when imported ideals provided a model for a new city. The earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 provided a second point at which utopian dreaming spurred visions for the city. Christchurch’s earthquakes have provided a unique opportunity for a city to re-imagine itself. Yet, as is the fate for all imaginary places, reality got in the way.
Buildings subject to earthquake shaking will tend to move not only horizontally but also rotate in plan. In-plan rotation is known as “building torsion” and it may occur for a variety of reasons, including stiffness and strength eccentricity and/or torsional effects from ground motions. Methods to consider torsion in structural design standards generally involve analysis of the structure in its elastic state. This is despite the fact that the structural elements can yield, thereby significantly altering the building response and the structural element demands. If demands become too large, the structure may collapse. While a number of studies have been conducted into the behavior of structures considering inelastic building torsion, there appears to be no consensus that one method is better than another and as a result, provisions within current design standards have not adopted recent proposals in the literature. However, the Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission recently made the recommendation that provisions to account for inelastic torsional response of buildings be introduced within New Zealand building standards. Consequently, this study examines how and to what extent the torsional response due to system eccentricity may affect the seismic performance of a building and considers what a simple design method should account for. It is concluded that new methods should be simple, be applicable to both the elastic and inelastic range of response, consider bidirectional excitation and include guidance for multi-story systems.
Predictive modelling provides an efficient means to analyse the coastal environment and generate knowledge for long term urban planning. In this study, the numerical models SWAN and XBeach were incorporated into the ESRI ArcGIS interface by means of the BeachMMtool. This was applied to the Greater Christchurch coastal environment to simulate geomorphological evolution through hydrodynamic forcing. Simulations were performed using the recent sea level rise predictions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2013) to determine whether the statutory requirements outlined in the New Zealand Coastal Policy Statement 2010 are consistent with central, regional and district designations. Our results indicate that current land use zoning in Greater Christchurch is not consistent with these predictions. This is because coastal hazard risk has not been thoroughly quantified during the process of installing the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority residential red zone. However, the Christchurch City Council’s flood management area does provide an extent to which managed coastal retreat is a real option. The results of this research suggest that progradation will continue to occur along the Christchurch foreshore due to the net sediment flux retaining an onshore direction and the current hydrodynamic activity not being strong enough to move sediment offshore. However, inundation during periods of storm surge poses a risk to human habitation on low lying areas around the Avon-Heathcote Estuary and the Brooklands lagoon.
This paper presents the preliminary conclusions of the first stage of Wellington Case Study project (Regulating For Resilience in an Earthquake Vulnerable City) being undertaken by the Disaster Law Research Group at the University of Canterbury Law School. This research aims to map the current regulatory environment around improving the seismic resilience of the urban built environment. This work provides the basis for the second stage of the project which will map the regulatory tools onto the reality of the current building stock in Wellington. Using a socio-legal methodology, the current research examines the regulatory framework around seismic resilience for existing buildings in New Zealand, with a particularly focus on multi-storey in the Wellington CBD. The work focusses both on the operation and impact of the formal seismic regulatory tools open to public regulators (under the amended Building Act) as other non-seismic regulatory tools. As well as examining the formal regulatory frame, the work also provides an assessment of the interactions between other non-building acts (such as Health and Safety at Work Act 2015) on the requirements of seismic resilience. Other soft-law developments (particularly around informal building standards) are also examined. The final output of this work will presents this regulatory map in a clear and easily accessible manner and provide an assessment of the suitability of this at times confusing and patchy legal environment as Wellington moves towards becoming a resilient city. The final conclusion of this work will be used to specifically examine the ability of Wellington to make this transition under the current regulatory environment as phase two of the Wellington Case Study project.
A photograph of a Victim Support poster on a traffic light on Oxford Street. The poster reads, "Looking after yourself in times of crisis. Firstly you have the strength within you to get through this. You are not alone: keep talking to the people around you, use your family, whanau, friends and colleagues and do what you can to help others. Don't ingnore your own emotions and don't be afraid to ask for help when you need it. Keep positive: it is important to keep a positive attitude to events keeping a focus on your strengths and positive coping skills. Do things that will help give you a sense of control. Remaining positive can help reduce stress and anxiety in other people around you, especially children. Reduce stress: you need to keep to routines as much as possible including eating, sleeping, exercise and incorporating those things you enjoy doing as part of your usual daytime activities. Do things that you find comforting as be with people who company you enjoy. It is especially important for children to be participating in normal routine activities as quickly as possible to reduce long term stress factors. You may experience a range of feelings as you move through the crisis and afterwards. Stress, worry, anxiety, fear, uncertainty, anger etc. all are natural responses. Feeling tense and constantly going over events in your mind are also natural responses. It is normal and okay to feel whatever you are feeling. The intensity of uncomfortable thoughts and feelings will lessen as life returns to normal".
Observations in major earthquakes have shown that rockable structures suffered less to no damage. During rocking, that is, partial and temporary footing separations, the influx of seismic energy is interrupted and thus the impact of the base excitation is reduced. Rocking causes the structure to deform more rigid like. Consequently, the structure experiences less deformation along the height and thus a lower damage potential. Although many researchers have studied the influence of rockable footings, most of these are either analytical or numerical, and only a very few structures have been built with rockable footings worldwide, for example, the chimney at Christchurch Airport and the South Rangitikei Viaduct in New Zealand. Despite these studies, a thorough and understanding is not yet available, especially with respect to experimental validations. This work is the first to investigate the rocking behaviour of bridges with different slenderness using large‐scale shake table experiments. To limit the number of influence factors, a stiff footing support and the same fixed‐base fundamental frequency of the bridges were assumed. The result shows that the girder displacement and the footing rotation of the tall bridge do not always move in phase, which cannot be observed in the short bridge. The results demonstrate the important role of slenderness in the overall responses of rockable bridges. This behaviour cannot be observed in bridges with a commonly assumed fixed base since the slenderness effect cannot be activated.
Predictive modelling provides an efficient means to analyse the coastal environment and generate knowledge for long term urban planning. In this study, the numerical models SWAN and XBeach were incorporated into the ESRI ArcGIS interface by means of the BeachMMtool. This was applied to the Greater Christchurch coastal environment to simulate geomorphological evolution through hydrodynamic forcing. Simulations were performed using the recent sea level rise predictions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2013) to determine whether the statutory requirements outlined in the New Zealand Coastal Policy Statement 2010 are consistent with central, regional and district designations. Our results indicate that current land use zoning in Greater Christchurch is not consistent with these predictions. This is because coastal hazard risk has not been thoroughly quantified during the process of installing the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority residential red zone. However, the Christchurch City Council’s flood management area does provide an extent to which managed coastal retreat is a real option. The results of this research suggest that progradation will continue to occur along the Christchurch foreshore due to the net sediment flux retaining an onshore direction and the current hydrodynamic activity not being strong enough to move sediment offshore. However, inundation during periods of storm surge poses a risk to human habitation on low lying areas around the Avon-Heathcote Estuary and the Brooklands lagoon.
A video of a presentation by Associate Professor John Vargo during the fifth plenary of the 2016 People in Disasters Conference. Vargo is a senior researcher and co-leader of the Resilient Organisations Research Programme at the University of Canterbury. The presentation is titled, "Organisational Resilience is more than just Business Continuity".The abstract for this presentation reads as follows: Business Continuity Management is well-established process in many larger organisations and a key element in their emergency planning. Research carried out by resilient organisations follow the 2010 and 2011 Canterbury Earthquakes show that most small organisations did not have a business continuity plan (BCP), yet many of these organisations did survive the massive disruptions following the earthquakes. They were resilient to these catastrophic events, but in the absence of a BCP. This research also found that many of the organisations with BCP's, struggled to use them effectively when facing real events that did not align with the BCP. Although the BCPs did a good job of preparing organisations to deal with technology and operational disruptions, there was virtually no coverage for the continuity of people. Issues surrounding staff welfare and engagement were amongst the most crucial issues faced by Canterbury organisations, yet impacts of societal and personal disruption did not feature in BCPs. Resilience is a systematic way of looking at how an organization can survive a crisis and thrive in an uncertain world. Business continuity is an important aspect for surviving the crisis, but it is only part of the bigger picture addressed by organisational resilience. This presentation will show how organizational experiences in the Canterbury earthquakes support the need to move to a 'Business Continuity' for the '21st Century', one that incorporates more aspects of resilience, especially the 'people' areas of leadership, culture, staff welfare, and engagement.
This thesis investigates life-safety risk in earthquakes. The first component of the thesis utilises a dataset of earthquake injuries and deaths from recent earthquakes in New Zealand to identify cause, context, and risk factors of injury and death in the 2011 MW6.3 Christchurch earthquake and 2016 MW7.8 Kaikōura earthquake. Results show that nearly all deaths occurred from being hit by structural elements from buildings, while most injuries were caused by falls, strains and being hit by contents or non-structural elements. Statistical analysis of injured cases compared to an uninjured control group found that age, gender, building damage, shaking intensity, and behaviour during shaking were the most significant risk factors for injury during these earthquakes. The second part of the thesis uses the empirical findings from the first section to develop two tools for managing life-safety risk in earthquakes. The first tool is a casualty estimation model for health system and emergency response planning. An existing casualty model used in New Zealand was validated against observed data from the 2011 Christchurch earthquake and found to underestimate moderate and severe injuries by an order of magnitude. The model was then updated to include human behaviour such as protective actions, falls and strain type injuries that are dependent on shaking intensity, as well as injuries and deaths outside buildings. These improvements resulted in a closer fit to observed casualties for the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. The second tool that was developed is a framework to set seismic loading standards for design based on fatality risk targets. The proposed framework extends the risk-targeted hazard method, by moving beyond collapse risk targets, to fatality risk targets for individuals in buildings and societal risk in cities. The framework also includes treatment of epistemic uncertainty in seismic hazard to allow this uncertainty to be used in risk-based decision making. The framework is demonstrated by showing how the current New Zealand loading standards could be revised to achieve uniform life-safety risk across the country and how the introduction of a new loading factor can reduce risk aggregation in cities. Not on Alma, moved and emailed. 1/02/2023 ce