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Articles, UC QuakeStudies

A document containing examples of items provided in a folder for businesses. These are taken to the initial face-to-face meeting with business owners to discuss the impact and disruption of upcoming SCIRT rebuild works.

Articles, UC QuakeStudies

The Canterbury earthquakes destroyed the Christchurch CBD and caused massive disruption to business across the region. There was an urgent need to support business survival and foster economic recovery. Recover Canterbury is a hub providing seamless support for businesses affected by the earthquakes, giving them easy access to government and commercial expertise in a one-stop shop.

Videos, UC QuakeStudies

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.

Research papers, University of Canterbury Library

Background and methodology The Mw 7.8, 14th November 2016 earthquake centred (item b, figure 1) in the Hurunui District of the South Island, New Zealand, damaged critical infrastructure across North Canterbury and Marlborough. We investigate the impacts to infrastructure and adaptations to the resulting service disruption in four small rural towns (figure 1): Culverden (a), Waiau (c), Ward (d) and Seddon (e). This is accomplished though literary research, interviews and geospatial analysis. Illustrating our methods, we have displayed here a Hurunui District hazard map (figure 2b) and select infrastructure inventories (figures 2a, 3).

Research papers, University of Canterbury Library

We present the initial findings from a study of adaptive resilience of lifelines organisations providing essential infrastructure services, in Christchurch, New Zealand following the earthquakes of 2010-2011. Qualitative empirical data was collected from 200 individuals in 11 organisations. Analysis using a grounded theory method identified four major factors that aid organisational response, recovery and renewal following major disruptive events. Our data suggest that quality of top and middle-level leadership, quality of external linkages, level of internal collaboration, ability to learn from experience, and staff well-being and engagement influence adaptive resilience. Our data also suggest that adaptive resilience is a process or capacity, not an outcome and that it is contextual. Post-disaster capacity/resources and post-disaster environment influence the nature of adaptive resilience.

Research papers, Victoria University of Wellington

The suburb of New Brighton in Christchurch Aotearoa was once a booming retail sector until the end of its exclusivity to Saturday shopping in 1980 and the aftermath of the devastating 2011 Christchurch earthquake. The suburb of New Brighton was hit particularly hard and fell into economic collapse, partly brought on by the nature of its economic structure. This implosion created an urban crisis where people and businesses abandoned the suburb and its once-booming commercial economy. As a result, New Brighton has been left with the residue of abandoned infrastructure and commercial propaganda such as billboards, ATM machines, commercial facades, and shopping trolleys that as abandoned fragments, no longer contribute to culture, society and the economy. This design-led research investigation proposes to repurpose the broken objects that were left behind. By strategically selecting objects that are symbols of the root cause of the economic devastation, the repurposed and re-contextualised fragments will seek to allegorically expose the city’s destructive economic narrative, while providing a renewed sense of place identity for the people. This design-led thesis investigation argues that the seemingly innocuous icons of commercial industry, such as billboards, ATM machines, commercial facades, and shopping trolleys, are intended to act as lures to encourage people to spend money; ultimately, these urban and architectural lures can contribute to economic devastation. The aim of this investigation is to repurpose abandoned fragments of capitalist infrastructure in ways that can help to unveil new possibilities for a disrupted community and enhance their awareness of what led to the urban disruption. The thesis proposes to achieve this research aim by exploring three principal research objectives: 1) to assimilate and re-contextualise disconnected urban fragments into new architectural interventions; 2) to anthropomorphise these new interventions so that they are recognisable as architectural ‘inhabitants’, the storytellers of the urban context; and 3) to curate these new architectural interventions in ways that enable a community-scale allegorical and didactic experience to be recognised.

Research papers, University of Canterbury Library

The 14 November 2016 Kaikōura earthquake had major impacts on New Zealand's transport system. Road, rail and port infrastructure was damaged, creating substantial disruption for transport operators, residents, tourists, and business owners in the Canterbury, Marlborough and Wellington regions, with knock-on consequences elsewhere. During both the response and recovery phases, a large amount of information and data relating to the transport system was generated, managed, analysed, and exchanged within and between organisations to assist decision making. To improve information and data exchanges and related decision making in the transport sector during future events and guide new resilience strategies, we present key findings from a recent post-earthquake assessment. The research involved 35 different stakeholder groups and was conducted for the Ministry of Transport. We consider what transport information was available, its usefulness, where it was sourced from, mechanisms for data transfer between organisations, and suggested approaches for continued monitoring.

Research Papers, Lincoln University

Natural hazards continue to have adverse effects on communities and households worldwide, accelerating research on proactively identifying and enhancing characteristics associated with resilience. Although resilience is often characterized as a return to normal, recent studies of postdisaster recovery have highlighted the ways in which new opportunities can emerge following disruption, challenging the status quo. Conversely, recovery and reconstruction may serve to reinforce preexisting social, institutional, and development pathways. Our understanding of these dynamics is limited however by the small number of practice examples, particularly for rural communities in developed nations. This study uses a social–ecological inventory to document the drivers, pathways, and mechanisms of resilience following a large-magnitude earthquake in Kaikōura, a coastal community in Aotearoa New Zealand. As part of the planning and implementation phase of a multiyear project, we used the tool as the basis for indepth and contextually sensitive analysis of rural resilience. Moreover, the deliberate application of social–ecological inventory was the first step in the research team reengaging with the community following the event. The inventory process provided an opportunity for research partners to share their stories and experiences and develop a shared understanding of changes that had taken place in the community. Results provide empirical insight into reactions to disruptive change associated with disasters. The inventory also informed the design of targeted research collaborations, established a platform for longer-term community engagement, and provides a baseline for assessing longitudinal changes in key resilience-related characteristics and community capacities. Findings suggest the utility of social–ecological inventory goes beyond natural resource management, and that it may be appropriate in a range of contexts where institutional, social, and economic restructuring have developed out of necessity in response to felt or anticipated external stressors.

Research papers, Victoria University of Wellington

A natural disaster will inevitably strike New Zealand in the coming years, damaging educational facilities. Delays in building quality replacement facilities will lead to short-term disruption of education, risking long-term inequalities for the affected students. The Christchurch earthquake demonstrated the issues arising from a lack of school planning and support. This research proposes a system that can effectively provide rapid, prefabricated, primary schools in post-disaster environments. The aim is to continue education for children in the short term, while using construction that is suitable until the total replacement of the given school is completed. The expandable prefabricated architecture meets the strength, time, and transport requirements to deliver a robust, rapid relief temporary construction. It is also adaptable to any area within New Zealand. This design solution supports personal well-being and mitigates the risk of educational gaps, PTSD linked with anxiety and depression, and many other mental health disorders that can impact students and teachers after a natural disaster.

Research papers, University of Canterbury Library

Asset management in power systems is exercised to improve network reliability to provide confidence and security for customers and asset owners. While there are well-established reliability metrics that are used to measure and manage business-as-usual disruptions, an increasing appreciation of the consequences of low-probability high-impact events means that resilience is increasingly being factored into asset management in order to provide robustness and redundancy to components and wider networks. This is particularly important for electricity systems, given that a range of other infrastructure lifelines depend upon their operation. The 2010-2011 Canterbury Earthquake Sequence provides valuable insights into electricity system criticality and resilience in the face of severe earthquake impacts. While above-ground assets are relatively easy to monitor and repair, underground assets such as cables emplaced across wide areas in the distribution network are difficult to monitor, identify faults on, and repair. This study has characterised in detail the impacts to buried electricity cables in Christchurch resulting from seismically-induced ground deformation caused primarily by liquefaction and lateral spread. Primary modes of failure include cable bending, stretching, insulation damage, joint braking and, being pulled off other equipment such as substation connections. Performance and repair data have been compiled into a detailed geospatial database, which in combination with spatial models of peak ground acceleration, peak ground velocity and ground deformation, will be used to establish rigorous relationships between seismicity and performance. These metrics will be used to inform asset owners of network performance in future earthquakes, further assess component criticality, and provide resilience metrics.

Research papers, University of Canterbury Library

The greater Wellington region, New Zealand, is highly vulnerable to large earthquakes. While attention has been paid to the consequences of earthquake damage to road, electricity and water supply networks, the consequences of wastewater network damage for public health, environmental health and habitability of homes remain largely unknown for Wellington City. The Canterbury and Kaikōura earthquakes have highlighted the vulnerability of sewerage systems to disruption during a disaster. Management of human waste is one of the critical components of disaster planning to reduce faecal-oral transmission of disease and exposure to disease-bearing vectors. In Canterbury and Kaikōura, emergency sanitation involved a combination of Port-a-loos, chemical toilets and backyard long-drops. While many lessons may be learned from experiences in Canterbury earthquakes, it is important to note that isolation is likely to be a much greater factor for Wellington households, compared to Christchurch, due to the potential for widespread landslides in hill suburbs affecting road access. This in turn implies that human waste may have to be managed onsite, as options such as chemical toilets and Port-a-loos rely completely on road access for delivering chemicals and collecting waste. While some progress has been made on options such as emergency composting toilets, significant knowledge gaps remain on how to safely manage waste onsite. In order to bridge these gaps, laboratory tests will be conducted through the second half of 2019 to assess the pathogen die-off rates in the composting toilet system with variables being the type of carbon bulking material and the addition of a Bokashi composting activator.

Research Papers, Lincoln University

The city of Christchurch, New Zealand, incurred significant damage due to a series of earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. The city had, by the late 2010s, regained economic and social normalcy after a sustained period of rebuilding and economic recovery. Through the concerted rebuilding effort, a modern central business district (CBD) with redesigned infrastructure and amenities was developed. The Christchurch rebuild was underpinned by a commitment of urban planners to an open and connected city, including the use of innovative technologies to gather, use and share data. As was the case elsewhere, the COVID-19 pandemic brought about significant disruptions to social and economic life in Christchurch. Border closures, lockdowns, trading limitations and other restrictions on movement led to changes in traditional consumer behaviors and affected the retail sector’s resilience. In this study, we used CBD pedestrian traffic data gathered from various locations to predict changes in retail spending and identify recovery implications through the lens of retail resilience. We found that the COVID-19 pandemic and its related lockdowns have driven a substantive change in the behavioral patterns of city users. The implications for resilient retail, sustainable policy and further research are explored.

Videos, UC QuakeStudies

A video of a presentation by Dr Scott Miles during the Community Resilience Stream of the 2016 People in Disasters Conference. The presentation is titled, "A Community Wellbeing Centric Approach to Disaster Resilience".The abstract for this presentation reads as follows: A higher bar for advancing community disaster resilience can be set by conducting research and developing capacity-building initiatives that are based on understanding and monitoring community wellbeing. This presentation jumps off from this view, arguing that wellbeing is the most important concept for improving the disaster resilience of communities. The presentation uses examples from the 2010 and 2011 Canterbury earthquakes to illustrate the need and effectiveness of a wellbeing-centric approach. While wellbeing has been integrated in the Canterbury recovery process, community wellbeing and resilience need to guide research and planning. The presentation unpacks wellbeing in order to synthesize it with other concepts that are relevant to community disaster resilience. Conceptualizing wellbeing as either the opportunity for or achievement of affiliation, autonomy, health, material needs, satisfaction, and security is common and relatively accepted across non-disaster fields. These six variables can be systematically linked to fundamental elements of resilience. The wellbeing variables are subject to potential loss, recovery, and adaptation based on the empirically established ties to community identity, such as sense of place. Variables of community identity are what translate the disruption, damage, restoration, reconstruction, and reconfiguration of a community's different critical services and capital resources to different states of wellbeing across a community that has been impacted by a hazard event. With reference to empirical research and the Canterbury case study, the presentation integrates these insights into a robust framework to facilitate meeting the challenge of raising the standard of community disaster resilience research and capacity building through development of wellbeing-centric approaches.

Research Papers, Lincoln University

In the last two decades, the retail sector has experienced unprecedented upheaval, having severe implications for economic development and sustenance of traditional inner-city retail districts. In the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, this effect has been exacerbated by a series of earthquakes in 2010/2011 which destroyed much of the traditional retail precinct of the city. After extensive rebuild activity of the city’s infrastructure, the momentum of retailers returning to the inner city was initially sluggish but eventually gathered speed supported by increased international visitation. In early 2020, the return to retail normality came to an abrupt halt after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study uses spending and transaction data to analyze the compounding impact of the earthquake’s aftermath, shift to online shopping, and the retail disruption in the Christchurch central retail precinct because of COVID-19. The findings illustrate how consumers through their spending respond to different types of external shocks, altering their consumption patterns and retail mode (offline and online) to cope with an ever-changing retail landscape. Each event triggers different spending patterns that have some similarities but also stark differences, having implications for a sustainable and resilient retail industry in Christchurch. Implications for urban retail precinct development are also discussed.

Videos, UC QuakeStudies

A video of a presentation by Bridget Tehan and Sharon Tortonson during the Community and Social Recovery Stream of the 2016 People in Disasters Conference. The presentation is titled, "Community and Social Service Organisations in Emergencies and Disasters in Australia and New Zealand".The abstract for this presentation reads as follows: What happens when support services for issues such as mental health, foster care or homelessness are impacted by a disaster? What happens to their staff? What happens to their clients? The community sector is a unique, valuable and diverse component of Australasian economy and society. Through its significant numbers of employees and volunteers, its diversity, the range of service and advocacy programs it delivers, and the wide range of people it supports, it delivers value to communities and strengthens society. The community and social services sector builds resilience daily through services to aged care, child welfare and disability, domestic violence, housing and homelessness, and mental health care. The sector's role is particularly vital in assisting disadvantaged people and communities. For many, community sector organisations are their primary connection to the broader community and form the basis of their resilience to everyday adversity, as well as in times of crisis. However, community sector organisations are particularly vulnerable in a major emergency or disaster. Australian research shows that the most community sector organisations are highly vulnerable and unprepared for emergencies. This lack of preparedness can have impacts on service delivery, business continuity, and the wellbeing of clients. The consequences of major disruptions to the provision of social services to vulnerable people are serious and could be life-threatening in a disaster. This presentation will review the Victorian Council of Social Service (Australia) and Social Equity and Wellbeing Network (formerly the Christchurch Council of Social Services) records on the impacts of emergencies on community sector organisations, staff, and clients. From the discussion of records, recommendations will be presented that could improve the resilience of this crucial sector.

Research Papers, Lincoln University

Orientation: Large-scale events such as disasters, wars and pandemics disrupt the economy by diverging resource allocation, which could alter employment growth within the economy during recovery. Research purpose: The literature on the disaster–economic nexus predominantly considers the aggregate performance of the economy, including the stimulus injection. This research assesses the employment transition following a disaster by removing this stimulus injection and evaluating the economy’s performance during recovery. Motivation for the study: The underlying economy’s performance without the stimulus’ benefit remains primarily unanswered. A single disaster event is used to assess the employment transition to guide future stimulus response for disasters. Research approach/design and method: Canterbury, New Zealand, was affected by a series of earthquakes in 2010–2011 and is used as a single case study. Applying the historical construction–economic relationship, a counterfactual level of economic activity is quantified and compared with official results. Using an input–output model to remove the economy-wide impact from the elevated activity reveals the performance of the underlying economy and employment transition during recovery. Main findings: The results indicate a return to a demand-driven level of building activity 10 years after the disaster. Employment transition is characterised by two distinct periods. The first 5 years are stimulus-driven, while the 5 years that follow are demand-driven from the underlying economy. After the initial period of elevated building activity, construction repositioned to its long-term level near 5% of value add. Practical/managerial implications: The level of building activity could be used to confidently assess the performance of regional economies following a destructive disaster. The study results argue for an incentive to redevelop the affected area as quickly as possible to mitigate the negative effect of the destruction and provide a stimulus for the economy. Contribution/value-add: This study contributes to a growing stream of regional disaster economics research that assesses the economic effect using a single case study.