A photograph of six students on a bridge they have constructed across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of two students walking on a bridge across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of three students standing on a bridge across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of five students on a bridge they have constructed across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of five students on a bridge they have constructed across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of eight students falling through a bridge they have constructed across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of eight students falling through a bridge they have constructed across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of a student falling through a bridge into the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of two students walking on a bridge across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of a student walking on a bridge across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of two students walking on a bridge across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of a student walking on a bridge across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of two students walking on a bridge across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of eight students on a bridge they have constructed across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of six students on a bridge they have constructed across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of seven students on a bridge they have constructed across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of seven students on a bridge they have constructed across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of six students on a bridge they have constructed across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of six students on a bridge they have constructed across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of five students on a bridge they have constructed across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of a toppled filing cabinet in an office in the Department of Civil and Natural Resources Engineering at the University of Canterbury, after the 4 September 2010 earthquake.
A photograph of four students on a bridge they have constructed across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of a student walking on a bridge across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of seven students on a bridge they have constructed across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of eight students falling through a bridge they have constructed across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of two students walking on a bridge across the Avon River, outside the UCSA building. The photograph was taken in 2015 during the annual Civil Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
A photograph of a crowd of students sitting on the bank of the Avon River outside the UCSA building in 2015. The students are gathered to watch the annual Engineering Bridge Challenge event.
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.
Staff in the engineering building begin to clean up.
Exterior of the Engineering library following the September earthquake.