<b>In the late 1960s the Wellington City Council surveyed all the commercial buildings in the city and marked nearly 200 as earthquake prone. The owners were given 15 years to either strengthen or demolish their buildings. The end result was mass demolition throughout the seventies and eighties.¹ Prompted by the Christchurch earthquakes, once again the council has published a list of over 630 earthquake prone buildings that need to be strengthened or demolished by 2030.²Of these earthquake prone buildings, the majority were built between 1880 and 1930, with 125 buildings appearing on the Wellington City Council Heritage Building List.³ This list accounts for a significant proportion of character buildings in the city. There is a danger that the aesthetic integrity of our city will be further damaged due to the urgent need to strengthen these buildings. Many of the building owners are resistant because of the high cost. By adapting these buildings to house co-workspaces, we can gain more than just the retention of the building’s heritage. The seismic upgrade provides the opportunity for the office space to be redesigned to suit changes in the ways we work. Through a design-based research approach this thesis proposes a framework that clarifies the process of adapting Wellington’s earthquake prone heritage buildings to accommodate co-working. This framework deals with the key concepts of program, structure and heritage. The framework is tested on one of Wellington’s earthquake prone heritage buildings, the Wellington Working Men’s Club, in order to demonstrate what can be gained from this strengthening process. ¹ Reid, J., “Hometown Boomtown,” in NZ On Screen (Wellington, 1983).</b>
² Wellington City Council, List of Earthquake Prone Buildings as at 06/03/2017. (Wellington: Absolutely Positively Wellington. 2017).
³ ibid.
For some people, religion, spirituality and faith (RSF) serves an important function, helping them deal with difficult everyday life challenges. This qualitative ethnographic study examines how and in what ways a group of Cantabrians engaged with RSF in dealing with diverse forms of significant trauma – from moments of crisis through to more extended processes of recovery. The research is located within the context of post-earthquake Christchurch, and is based on fieldwork undertaken in 2012–2013. It explores the experiences of respondents representing traditional Christian and non-orthodox, non-Christian faith paths. The thesis draws on data from participant stories to emphasise the subjective experience of RSF and trauma. It argues that in times of crisis, some people draw on RSF to help them address difficult life challenges. The study demonstrates the breadth, diversity and significance of such resourcing, as well as the sometimes surprising, unanticipated forms that this engagement with RSF may take. Contrary to theories that emphasise the marginalisation of religion during times of intense distress, the thesis shows that in varying moments of crisis, people for whom RSF is important, may draw on diverse forms of RSF as a matter of priority to help them.
Thompson and Clark hasn't just been paid by the government to spy on Greenpeace and earthquake claimants in Christchurch. It's also been monitoring the activities of another three activist groups, including Oil Free Wellington.
This paper begins with a discussion of the history of negligent manslaughter in New Zealand and its development from the standard of ordinary negligence to the current test of a “major departure” from the expected standard of care, as set out under s 150A of the Crimes Act 1961. The paper then examines failings in s 150A’s current application, arguing that the “major departure” test has created injustices due to its strictly objective nature. Two examples of this are discussed in-depth, Bawa-Garba v R (UK) where a doctor was convicted of grossly negligent manslaughter for the death of her patient; and the decision not to prosecute the negligent engineers of the CTV building which collapsed in the Christchurch earthquake of 2011. The paper discusses three potential resolutions moving forward. It concludes that a more subjective interpretation of the wording of s 150A, which takes account of circumstances excusing or condemning a defendant’s conduct, would prevent future injustices and be a reasonably open interpretation on the wording of s 150A.
We measure the longer-term effect of a major earthquake on the local economy, using night-time light intensity measured from space, and investigate whether insurance claim payments for damaged residential property affected the local recovery process. We focus on the destructive Christchurch earthquake of 2011 as our case study. In this event more than 95% of residential housing units were covered by insurance, but insurance payments were staggered over 5 years, enabling us to identify their local impact. We find that night-time luminosity can capture the process of recovery and describe the recovery’s determinants. We also find that insurance payments contributed significantly to the process of economic recovery after the earthquake, but delayed payments were less affective and cash settlement of claims were more affective in contributing to local recovery than insurance-managed rebuilding.
We estimate the causal effects of a large unanticipated natural disaster on high schoolers’ university enrolment decisions and subsequent medium-term labour market outcomes. Using national administrative data after a destructive earthquake in New Zealand, we estimate that the disaster raises tertiary education enrolment of recent high school graduates by 6.1 percentage points. The effects are most pronounced for males, students who are academically weak relative to their peers, and students from schools directly damaged by the disaster. As relatively low ability males are overrepresented in sectors of the labour market helped by the earthquake, greater demand for university may stem from permanent changes in deeper behavioural parameters such as risk aversion or time preference, rather than as a coping response to poor economic opportunities.
A review of the week's news including... the former wife of a highly regarded Maori community leader who died in 2016 says she has passed on to Police the names of people she believes may have been involved in, or have knowledge of, what she's calling a paedophile sex ring involving her former husband, Peters on Trump, Wellington's new bus fleet hits the streets, more details of plans to cut jobs at the national museum, anti-gambling groups want poker machines included in a crackdown on money laundering, the worst winter for moteliers since the Canterbury earthquakes and who's to blame?, a statue on Bastion Point that could be as big as the Statue of Liberty and what happens when RNZ meets thrash metal?
© 2018 Springer Nature B.V. This study compares seismic losses considering initial construction costs and direct-repair costs for New Zealand steel moment-resisting frame buildings with friction connections and those with extended bolted-end-plate connections. A total of 12 buildings have been designed and analysed considering both connection types, two building heights (4-storey and 12-storey), and three locations around New Zealand (Auckland, Christchurch, and Wellington). It was found that buildings with friction connections required design to a higher design ductility, yet are generally stiffer due to larger beams being required to satisfy higher connection overstrength requirements. This resulted in the frames with friction connections experiencing lower interstorey drifts on most floors but similar peak total floor accelerations, and subsequently incurring lower drift-related seismic repair losses. Frames with friction connections tended to have lower expected net-present-costs within 50 years of the building being in service for shorter buildings and/or if located in regions of high seismicity. None of the frames with friction connections in Auckland showed any benefits due to the low seismicity of the region.
Farming and urban regions are impacted by earthquake disasters in different ways, and feature a range of often different recovery requirements. In New Zealand, and elsewhere, most earthquake impact and recovery research is urban focused. This creates a research deficit that can lead to the application of well-researched urban recovery strategies in rural areas to suboptimal effect. To begin to reduce this deficit, in-depth case studies of the earthquake impacts and recovery of three New Zealand farms severely impacted by the 14th November 2016, M7.8 Hurunui-Kaikōura earthquake were conducted. The initial earthquake, its aftershocks and coseismic hazards (e.g., landslides, liquefaction, surface rupture) affected much of North Canterbury, Marlborough and the Wellington area. The three case study farms were chosen to broadly represent the main types of farming and topography in the Hurunui District in North Canterbury. The farms were directly and indirectly impacted by earthquakes and related hazards. On-farm infrastructure (e.g., woolsheds, homesteads) and essential services (e.g., water, power), frequently sourced from distributed networks, were severely impacted. The earthquake occurred after two years of regional drought had already stressed farm systems and farmers to restructuring or breaking point. Cascading interlinked hazards stemming from the earthquakes and coseismic hazards continued to disrupt earthquake recovery over a year after the initial earthquake. Semi-structured interviews with the farmers were conducted nine and fourteen months after the initial earthquake to capture the timeline of on-going impacts and recovery. Analysis of both geological hazard data and interview data resulted in the identification of key factors influencing farm level earthquake impact and recovery. These include pre-existing conditions (e.g., drought); farm-specific variations in recovery timelines; and resilience strategies for farm recovery resources. The earthquake recovery process presented all three farms with opportunities to change their business plans and adapt to mitigate on-going and future risk.
This thesis presents the findings from an experimental programme to determine the performance and behaviour of an integrated building incorporating low damage structural and non-structural systems. The systems investigated included post-tensioned rocking concrete frames, articulated floor solutions, low damage claddings and low damage partition systems. As part of a more general aim to increase the resilience of society against earthquake hazards, more emphasis has been given to damage-control design approaches in research. Multiple low-damage earthquake resistant structural and non-structural systems have emerged that are able to withstand high levels of drift or deflections will little or negligible residual. Dry jointed connections, articulated floor solutions, low damage cladding systems and low damage drywall partitions have all been developed separately and successfully tested. In spite of the extensive research effort and the adoption in practice of the low damage systems, work was required to integrate the systems within one building and verify the constructibility, behaviour and performance of the integrated systems. The objectives of this research were to perform dynamic experimental testing of a building which incorporated the low damage systems and acquire data which could be used to dynamically validate numerical models for each of the systems. A three phase experimental programme was devised and performed to dynamically test a half-scale two storey reinforced concrete building on the University of Canterbury shaking table. The three phases of the programme investigated: The structural system only. The rocking connections were tested as Post-Tensioned only connections and Hybrid connections (including dissipators). Two different articulated floor connections were also investigated. Non-structural systems. The Hybrid building was tested with each non-structural system separately; including low damage claddings, low damage partitions and traditional partitions. The Complete building was tested with Hybrid connections, low damage claddings and low damage partitions all integrated within the test specimen. The building was designed based on a full scale prototype building following the direct displacement based design to reach a peak inter-storey drift of 1.6% in a 1/500 year ground motion for a Wellington site. For each test set up, the test specimen was subjected to a ground motion sequence of 39 single direction ground motions. Through the sequence, both the local and global behaviours of the building and integrated systems were recorded in real time. The test specimen was subjected to over 400 ground motions throughout the testing programme. It sustained no significant damage that required reparations other than crumbling of the grout pads. The average peak inter-storey drifts of the buildings were lower than the design value of 1.6%. The low damage non-structural elements were undamaged in the ground motion sequence. The data acquired from each of the phases was used to successfully validate numerical models for each of the low damage systems included in the research.
