With Andrew Cleland - Chief Executive of the Institution of Professional Engineers NZ. Dr Maan Alkaisi - Co-chair Christchurch Earthquake Families Group. Maurice Williamson - Minister for Building and Construction.
A digitally manipulated image of demolition machinery, with the Hotel So in the background. The photographer comments, "Strange things happen when you use technicolor film".
Christchurch earthquake events have raised questions on the adequacy of performance-based provisions in the current national building code. At present, in the building code the performance objectives are expressed in terms of safety and health criteria that could affect building occupants. In general, under the high intensity Christchurch events, buildings performed well in terms of life-safety (with a few exceptions) and it proved that the design practices adopted for those buildings could meet the performance objectives set by the building code. However, the damage incurred in those buildings resulted in unacceptably high economic loss. It is timely and necessary to revisit the objectives towards building performance in the building code and to include provisions for reducing economic implications in addition to the current requirements. Based on the observed performance of some buildings, a few specific issues in the current design practices that could have contributed to extensive damage have been identified and recommended for further research leading towards improved performance of structures. In particular, efforts towards innovative design/construction solutions with low-damage concepts are encouraged. New Zealand has been one of the leading countries in developing many innovative technologies. However, such technically advanced research findings usually face challenges towards implementation. Some of the reasons include: (i) lack of policy requirements; (iii) absence of demonstrated performance of new innovations to convince stakeholders; and (iv) non-existence of design guidelines. Such barriers significantly affect implementation of low damage construction and possible strategies to overcome those issues are discussed in this paper.
GRANT ROBERTSON to the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment: Does he stand by his statement that the Household Labour Force Survey is "the standard internationally recognised measure of employment and unemployment"? PAUL GOLDSMITH to the Minister of Finance: What recent reports has he received on the economy? Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM to the Minister for Climate Change Issues: Does he stand by the answer given by the Minister of Finance to the question "Does he accept that human-induced climate change is real?" that "It may well be…"? Hon DAVID PARKER to the Minister of Finance: Given that unemployment is rising, exports are down, and house price inflation in Auckland and Canterbury is in double-digits, does he agree that after 5 years as Finance Minister he has failed to rebalance and diversify the economy; if not, why not? JOHN HAYES to the Minister of Trade: What efforts is the Government making to deal with the market effects of the possible contamination of some Fonterra diary exports? Hon SHANE JONES to the Minister for Economic Development: What action has he taken to ensure high value jobs are retained in Otago, Waikato, Northland, East Coast and Manawatu? KEVIN HAGUE to the Minister of Health: Exactly how many of the 21 recommendations to the Minister in the 2010 Public Health Advisory Committee Report The Best Start in Life: Achieving effective action on child health and wellbeing has he implemented? JACQUI DEAN to the Minister for Food Safety: What update can she provide the public on the safety of infant formula? Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR to the Minister for Primary Industries: Does he stand by all his statements? NICKY WAGNER to the Minister for Building and Construction: What reports has he received following the Government's announcement of a new earthquake-prone building policy? RICHARD PROSSER to the Minister for Primary Industries: What reports, if any, has he received regarding the regeneration of fish stocks in the Snapper 1 fishery? Dr DAVID CLARK to the Minister for Economic Development: Does he agree with Dunedin Mayor Dave Cull that "Central government needs to understand we can't have a … two-speed economy where Christchurch and Auckland are ripping ahead and the rest of the regions are withering"; if not, why not?
The city of Christchurch, New Zealand, was until very recently a “Junior England”—a small city that still bore the strong imprint of nineteenth-century British colonization, alongside a growing interest in the underlying biophysical setting and the indigenous pre-European landscape. All of this has changed as the city has been subjected to a devastating series of earthquakes, beginning in September 2010, and still continuing, with over 12,000 aftershocks recorded. One of these aftershocks, on February 22, 2011, was very close to the city center and very shallow with disastrous consequences, including a death toll of 185. Many buildings collapsed, and many more need to be demolished for safety purposes, meaning that over 80 percent of the central city will have gone. Tied up with this is the city’s precious heritage—its buildings and parks, rivers, and trees. The threats to heritage throw debates over economics and emotion into sharp relief. A number of nostalgic positions emerge from the dust and rubble, and in one form is a reverse-amnesia—an insistence of the past in the present. Individuals can respond to nostalgia in very different ways, at one extreme become mired in it and unable to move on, and at the other, dismissive of nostalgia as a luxury in the face of more pressing crises. The range of positions on nostalgia represent the complexity of heritage debates, attachment, and identity—and the ways in which disasters amplify the ongoing discourse on approaches to conservation and the value of historic landscapes.
This report focuses on the Waimakariri District Council's approach to earthquake recovery which was developed as an Integrated, Community-based Recovery Framework. This approach has been held up as exemplary in a number of fora and has received a great deal of interest and support both nationally and internationally. It has evolved as a result of the September earthquake and the thousands of aftershocks that have followed, along with the regulatory changes that have impacted on building safety and land availability since, but it builds on a set of pre-existing competencies and a well-established organisational culture that focusses on: * Working with communities and each other; * Keeping people informed; * Doing better everyday; * Taking responsibility; * Acting with integrity, honesty and trust. The report identifies, and speaks to, three themes or tensions drawn from either the disaster/emergency management literature or actual cases of recovery practice observed here in Canterbury over the last 2 years. These themes are the: 1. unique position of local government to undertake integrated or ‘holistic’ recovery work with community at the centre, versus the lack of clarity around both community and local government’s role in disaster recovery; 2. general consensus that good local government-community relationships are crucial to recovery processes, versus the lack of practical advice on how best to engage, and engage with, communities post-disaster; and 3. balancing Business as Usual (BaU) with recovery issues.Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management.
In the period between September 2010 and December 2011, Christchurch was shaken by a series of strong earthquakes including the MW7.1 4 September 2010, Mw 6.2 22 February 2011, MW6.2 13 June 2011 and MW6.0 23 December 2011 earthquakes. These earthquakes produced very strong ground motions throughout the city and surrounding areas that resulted in soil liquefaction and lateral spreading causing substantial damage to buildings, infrastructure and the community. The stopbank network along the Kaiapoi and Avon River suffered extensive damage with repairs projected to take several years to complete. This presented an opportunity to undertake a case-study on a regional scale of the effects of liquefaction on a stopbank system. Ultimately, this information can be used to determine simple performance-based concepts that can be applied in practice to improve the resilience of river protection works. The research presented in this thesis draws from data collected following the 4th September 2010 and 22nd February 2011 earthquakes. The stopbank damage is categorised into seven key deformation modes that were interpreted from aerial photographs, consultant reports, damage photographs and site visits. Each deformation mode provides an assessment of the observed mechanism of failure behind liquefaction-induced stopbank damage and the factors that influence a particular style of deformation. The deformation modes have been used to create a severity classification for the whole stopbank system, being ‘no or low damage’ and ‘major or severe damage’, in order to discriminate the indicators and factors that contribute to ‘major to severe damage’ from the factors that contribute to all levels of damage a number of calculated, land damage, stopbank damage and geomorphological parameters were analysed and compared at 178 locations along the Kaiapoi and Avon River stopbank systems. A critical liquefiable layer was present at every location with relatively consistent geotechnical parameters (cone resistance (qc), soil behaviour type (Ic) and Factor of Safety (FoS)) across the study site. In 95% of the cases the critical layer occurred within two times the Height of the Free Face (HFF,). A statistical analysis of the geotechnical factors relating to the critical layer was undertaken in order to find correlations between specific deformation modes and geotechnical factors. It was found that each individual deformation mode involves a complex interplay of factors that are difficult to represent through correlative analysis. There was, however, sufficient data to derive the key factors that have affected the severity of deformation. It was concluded that stopbank damage is directly related to the presence of liquefaction in the ground materials beneath the stopbanks, but is not critical in determining the type or severity of damage, instead it is merely the triggering mechanism. Once liquefaction is triggered it is the gravity-induced deformation that causes the damage rather than the shaking duration. Lateral spreading and specifically the depositional setting was found to be the key aspect in determining the severity and type of deformation along the stopbank system. The presence or absence of abandoned or old river channels and point bar deposits was found to significantly influence the severity and type of deformation. A review of digital elevation models and old maps along the Kaiapoi River found that all of the ‘major to severe’ damage observed occurred within or directly adjacent to an abandoned river channel. Whilst a review of the geomorphology along the Avon River showed that every location within a point bar deposit suffered some form of damage, due to the depositional environment creating a deposit highly susceptible to liquefaction.