A document that defines the requirements and objectives of design activities for SCIRT's reconstruction of the city's horizontal infrastructure and describes how these activities should be implemented.
A video of a presentation by Dr Penelope Burns during the second plenary of the 2016 People in Disasters Conference. Burns is the Senior Lecturer in the Department of General Practice at the University of Western Sydney. The presentation is titled, "Recovery Begins in Preparedness".The abstract for this presentation reads as follows: Involvement of primary care doctors in planning is essential for optimising the health outcomes of communities during and after disasters. However, our experience in Australia has shown that primary care doctors have not been included in a substantial way. This presentation will highlight our experience in the Victorian and New South Wales bushfires and the Sydney Siege. It will stress the crucial need to involve primary care doctors in planning at national, state, and local levels, and how we are working to implement this.
The 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence, and the resulting extensive data sets on damaged buildings that have been collected, provide a unique opportunity to exercise and evaluate previously published seismic performance assessment procedures. This poster provides an overview of the authors’ methodology to perform evaluations with two such assessment procedures, namely the P-58 guidelines and the REDi Rating System. P-58, produced by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the United States, aims to facilitate risk assessment and decision-making by quantifying earthquake ground shaking, structural demands, component damage and resulting consequences in a logical framework. The REDi framework, developed by the engineering firm ARUP, aids stakeholders in implementing resilience-based earthquake design. Preliminary results from the evaluations are presented. These have the potential to provide insights on the ability of the assessment procedures to predict impacts using “real-world” data. However, further work remains to critically analyse these results and to broaden the scope of buildings studied and of impacts predicted.
A video of a presentation by Garry Williams during the fourth plenary of the 2016 People in Disasters Conference. Williams is the Programme Manager of the Ministry of Education's Greater Christchurch Education Renewal Programme. The presentation is titled, "Education Renewal: A section response to the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake".The abstract for this presentation reads as follows: The Canterbury earthquakes caused a disaster recovery situation unparalleled in New Zealand's history. In addition to widespread damage to residential dwellings and destruction of Christchurch's central business district, the earthquakes damaged more than 200 schools from Hurunui in the north, to the Mackenzie District in the east, and Timaru in the south. The impact on education provision was substantial, with the majority of early childhood centres, schools and tertiary providers experiencing damage or subsequent, with the majority of early childhood centres, schools and tertiary providers experiencing damage or subsequent operational issues caused by the ensuing migration of people. Following the February earthquake, over 12,000 students had left the school they had been attending and enrolled elsewhere - often at a school outside the region. Shortened school days and compression of teaching into short periods meant shift-sharing students engaged in the curriculum being delivered in more diverse ways. School principals and staff reported increased fatigue and stress and changes in student behaviours, often related to repeated exposure to and ongoing reminders of the trauma of the earthquakes. While there has been a shift from direct, trauma-related presentations to the indirect effects of psychological adversity and daily life stresses, international experiences tells us that psychological recovery generally lags behind the immediate physical recovery and rebuilding. The Ministries of Health and Education and the Canterbury District Health Board have developed and implemented a joint action plan to address specifically the emerging mental health issues for youth in Canterbury. However, the impact of vulnerable and stressed adults on children's behaviour contributes to the overall impact of ongoing wellbeing issues on the educational outcomes for the community. There is substantial evidence supporting the need to focus on adults' resilience so they can support children and youth. Much of the Ministry's work around supporting children under stress is through supporting the adults responsible for teaching them and leading their schools. The education renewal programme exists to assist education communities to rebuild and look toward renewal. The response to the earthquakes provides a significant opportunity to better meet the needs and aspirations of children and youth people. All the parents want to see their children eager to learn, achieving success, and gaining knowledge and skills that will, in time, enable them to become confident, adaptable, economically independent adults. But this is not always the case, hence our approach to education renewal seeks to address inequities and improve outcome, while prioritising actions that will have a positive impact on learners in greatest need of assistance.
In September 2010 and February 2011 the Canterbury region of New Zealand was struck by two powerful earthquakes, registering magnitude 7.1 and 6.3 respectively on the Richter scale. The second earthquake was centred 10 kilometres south-east of the centre of Christchurch (the region’s capital and New Zealand’s third most populous urban area, with approximately 360,000 residents) at a depth of five kilometres. 185 people were killed, making it the second deadliest natural disaster in New Zealand’s history. (66 people were killed in the collapse of one building alone, the six-storey Canterbury Television building.) The earthquake occurred during the lunch hour, increasing the number of people killed on footpaths and in buses and cars by falling debris. In addition to the loss of life, the earthquake caused catastrophic damage to both land and buildings in Christchurch, particularly in the central business district. Many commercial and residential buildings collapsed in the tremors; others were damaged through soil liquefaction and surface flooding. Over 1,000 buildings in the central business district were eventually demolished because of safety concerns, and an estimated 70,000 people had to leave the city after the earthquakes because their homes were uninhabitable. The New Zealand Government declared a state of national emergency, which stayed in force for ten weeks. In 2014 the Government estimated that the rebuild process would cost NZ$40 billion (approximately US$27.3 billion, a cost equivalent to 17% of New Zealand’s annual GDP). Economists now estimate it could take the New Zealand economy between 50 and 100 years to recover. The earthquakes generated tens of thousands of insurance claims, both against private home insurance companies and against the New Zealand Earthquake Commission, a government-owned statutory body which provides primary natural disaster insurance to residential property owners in New Zealand. These ranged from claims for hundreds of millions of dollars concerning the local port and university to much smaller claims in respect of the thousands of residential homes damaged. Many of these insurance claims resulted in civil proceedings, caused by disputes about policy cover, the extent of the damage and the cost and/or methodology of repairs, as well as failures in communication and delays caused by the overwhelming number of claims. Disputes were complicated by the fact that the Earthquake Commission provides primary insurance cover up to a monetary cap, with any additional costs to be met by the property owner’s private insurer. Litigation funders and non-lawyer claims advocates who took a percentage of any insurance proceeds also soon became involved. These two factors increased the number of parties involved in any given claim and introduced further obstacles to resolution. Resolving these disputes both efficiently and fairly was (and remains) central to the rebuild process. This created an unprecedented challenge for the justice system in Christchurch (and New Zealand), exacerbated by the fact that the Christchurch High Court building was itself damaged in the earthquakes, with the Court having to relocate to temporary premises. (The High Court hears civil claims exceeding NZ$200,000 in value (approximately US$140,000) or those involving particularly complex issues. Most of the claims fell into this category.) This paper will examine the response of the Christchurch High Court to this extraordinary situation as a case study in innovative judging practices and from a jurisprudential perspective. In 2011, following the earthquakes, the High Court made a commitment that earthquake-related civil claims would be dealt with as swiftly as the Court's resources permitted. In May 2012, it commenced a special “Earthquake List” to manage these cases. The list (which is ongoing) seeks to streamline the trial process, resolve quickly claims with precedent value or involving acute personal hardship or large numbers of people, facilitate settlement and generally work proactively and innovatively with local lawyers, technical experts and other stakeholders. For example, the Court maintains a public list (in spreadsheet format, available online) with details of all active cases before the Court, listing the parties and their lawyers, summarising the facts and identifying the legal issues raised. It identifies cases in which issues of general importance have been or will be decided, with the expressed purpose being to assist earthquake litigants and those contemplating litigation and to facilitate communication among parties and lawyers. This paper will posit the Earthquake List as an attempt to implement innovative judging techniques to provide efficient yet just legal processes, and which can be examined from a variety of jurisprudential perspectives. One of these is as a case study in the well-established debate about the dialogic relationship between public decisions and private settlement in the rule of law. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Hazel Genn, Owen Fiss, David Luban, Carrie Menkel-Meadow and Judith Resnik, it will explore the tension between the need to develop the law through the doctrine of precedent and the need to resolve civil disputes fairly, affordably and expeditiously. It will also be informed by the presenter’s personal experience of the interplay between reported decisions and private settlement in post-earthquake Christchurch through her work mediating insurance disputes. From a methodological perspective, this research project itself gives rise to issues suitable for discussion at the Law and Society Annual Meeting. These include the challenges in empirical study of judges, working with data collected by the courts and statistical analysis of the legal process in reference to settlement. September 2015 marked the five-year anniversary of the first Christchurch earthquake. There remains widespread dissatisfaction amongst Christchurch residents with the ongoing delays in resolving claims, particularly insurers, and the rebuild process. There will continue to be challenges in Christchurch for years to come, both from as-yet unresolved claims but also because of the possibility of a new wave of claims arising from poor quality repairs. Thus, a final purpose of presenting this paper at the 2016 Meeting is to gain the benefit of other scholarly perspectives and experiences of innovative judging best practice, with a view to strengthening and improving the judicial processes in Christchurch. This Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association in New Orleans is a particularly appropriate forum for this paper, given the recent ten year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the plenary session theme of “Natural and Unnatural Disasters – human crises and law’s response.” The presenter has a personal connection with this theme, as she was a Fulbright scholar from New Zealand at New York University in 2005/2006 and participated in the student volunteer cleanup effort in New Orleans following Katrina. http://www.lawandsociety.org/NewOrleans2016/docs/2016_Program.pdf