Sometimes we come across such a spectacular artefact, that we are inspired to look a little deeper into the historical industry from which it was used. The discovery of a charcoal clothes iron got me thinking about the domestic lives … Continue reading →
An entry from Deb Robertson's blog for 16 August 2016 entitled, "Not Coming Out".The entry was downloaded on 3 November 2016.
Forty Christchurch homeowners have headed back to court, as they seek to take a class action against earthquake insurer Southern Response.
A plan which sets out how SCIRT will carry out internal communication over the life of its programme of work. The first version of this plan was produced on 24 January 2011.
The connections between walls of unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings and flexible timber diaphragms are critical building components that must perform adequately before desirable earthquake response of URM buildings may be achieved. Field observations made during the initial reconnaissance and the subsequent damage surveys of clay brick URM buildings following the 2010/2011 Canterbury, New Zealand, earthquakes revealed numerous cases where anchor connections joining masonry walls or parapets with roof or floor diaphragms appeared to have failed prematurely. These observations were more frequent for adhesive anchor connections than for through-bolt connections (i.e., anchorages having plates on the exterior facade of the masonry walls). Subsequently, an in-field test program was undertaken in an attempt to evaluate the performance of adhesive anchor connections between unreinforced clay brick URM walls and roof or floor diaphragm. The study consisted of a total of almost 400 anchor tests conducted in eleven existing URM buildings located in Christchurch, Whanganui and Auckland. Specific objectives of the study included the identification of failure modes of adhesive anchors in existing URM walls and the influence of the following variables on anchor load-displacement response: adhesive type, strength of the masonry materials (brick and mortar), anchor embedment depth, anchor rod diameter, overburden level, anchor rod type, quality of installation, and the use of metal mesh sleeves. In addition, the comparative performance of bent anchors (installed at an angle of minimum 22.5° to the perpendicular projection from the wall surface) and anchors positioned horizontally was investigated. Observations on the performance of wall-to-diaphragm connections in the 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquakes, a summary of the performed experimental program and test results, and a proposed pull-out capacity relationship for adhesive anchors installed into multi-leaf clay brick masonry are presented herein AM - Accepted Manuscript
A document which sets out the terms of reference for SCIRT's Safety Leadership Group.
More than 300 people turned out to a meeting in Christchurch last night to hear about botched Earthquake Commission repairs.
A document containing the research questions asked by Opinions Market Research Ltd when carrying out telephone surveys about SCIRT work.
A document containing the research questions asked by Opinions Market Research Ltd when carrying out face-to-face surveys about SCIRT work.
A plan which describes how SCIRT is to carry out construction works. The first version of this plan was produced on 10 August 2011.
A plan which describes how SCIRT will carry out design work. The first version of this plan was produced on 1 September 2011.
Christchurch's earthquake rebuild authority, Regenerate Christchurch, has released a new report setting out a timeline for what to do with the land - but angry residents are calling for action.
After Christchurch's devastating earthquakes, whole areas of the city, particularly out East, are starting from scratch - Aranui is one of them. Today, Lianne Dalziel cut the ribbon on the suburb's new community centre.
What the Panelists Finlay MacDonald and Peter Fa'afiu have been up to. The Reserve Bank has cut the Official Cash Rate to a record low 2%. Another book about retired All Blacks captain Richie McCaw has come out. The NZ Sevens rugby team is now officially out of medal contention. Are people all that interested in the Olympic games? Fairfax and Sky TV are in court over copyright issues. Christchurch City Councillor Ali Jones talks about what the cull of EQC staff will mean for life in the post-earthquake city.
A report which details the archaeological investigations carried out during the course of SCIRT project 11185, water main renewal work on Manchester Street.
A plan which outlines how SCIRT is to carry out condition investigations and analysis. The first version of this plan was produced on 1 September 2011.
A report which details the archaeological investigations carried out during the course of SCIRT projects 11115 and 11159, wastewater renewal work and storm water repair work on Ferry Road.
A plan which proactively addresses the risk of fraud and lays out the actions that SCIRT will take when any suspected fraud is reported or discovered. The first version of this plan was produced on 12 February 2014.
A report which details the findings of a follow-up performance audit carried out by the Office of the Auditor-General to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of arrangements to repair Christchurch's horizontal infrastructure.
A document which explains the pre-approval process for specialist lining contractors working on the SCIRT horizontal repair programme.This document has had sections removed and redacted to protect contractors' commercial interests.For a current list of approved contractors authorised to carry out lining works on Christchurch City Council assets, contact the Council.
Many Christchurch residents have used shipping containers and other temporary structures to store belongings in while repairs were carried out after the earthquakes. But the Christchurch City Council says it's had an increase in complaints from residents about containers and other temporary structures obscuring neighbours' views or obstructing council berms. Chairman of the council's regulation and consents committee David East says if earthquake repairs are completed, the container may have to go.
The Forsyth Barr building has stood silent and empty (except the occasional intruder and pigeons) since the February 2011 earthquake. It was sold "as is" and I understand that it is now going to be fitted out as a hotel. This is the building that had severe stairwell damage during the quake necessitating people being lowered via ropes etc on t...
WCFM & MERG Research Report 2016-002The Canterbury earthquakes resulted in numerous changes to the waterways of Ōtautahi Christchurch. These included bank destabilisation, liquefaction effects, changes in bed levels, and associated effects on flow regimes and inundation levels. This study set out to determine if these effects had altered the location and pattern of sites utilised by īnanga (Galaxias maculatus) for spawning, which are typically restricted to very specific locations in upper estuarine areas. Extensive surveys were carried out in the Heathcote/Ōpāwaho and Avon/Ōtākaro catchments over the four peak months of the 2015 spawning season. New spawning sites were found in both rivers and analysis against pre-earthquake records identified that other significant changes have occurred. Major changes include the finding of many new spawning sites in the Heathcote/Ōpāwaho catchment. Sites now occur up to 1.5km further downstream than the previously reported limit and include the first records of spawning below the Woolston Cut. Spawning sites in the Avon/Ōtākaro catchment also occur in new locations. In the mainstem, sites now occur both upstream and downstream of all previously reported locations. A concentrated area of spawning was identified in Lake Kate Sheppard at a distinctly different location versus pre-quake records, and no spawning was found on the western shores. Spawning was also recorded for the first time in Anzac Creek, a nearby waterway connected to Lake Kate Sheppard via a series of culverts.
Kim Hill talks to Sam Crofskey, the owner of C1 Espresso in the Christchurch CBD, which reopened in 2012 after the Canterbury earthquakes and will celebrate its twentieth anniversary this year. He spoke on the WORD Christchurch panel, How Are We Doing, Christchurch?, and this week launched Let's Take a Walk, a pop-up book for children about the quakes that he created with his wife Fleur and illustrator Hannah Beehre. He is joined by Joseph Hullen (Ngai Tuahuriri, Ngai Tahu), a hunter gatherer, fisherman, explorer, kaitiaki and storyteller who has spent a lifetime gathering traditional kai and listening to stories about his hapu. He is a whakapapa researcher for Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu, and is leading three sold-out walking tours during WORD Christchurch along the banks of the Otakaro (Avon River), uncovering the city's history.
essential systems upon which the well-being and functioning of societies depend. They deliver a service or a good to the population using a network, a combination of spatially-distributed links and nodes. As they are interconnected, network elements’ functionality is also interdependent. In case of a failure of one component, many others could be momentarily brought out-of-service. Further problems arise for buried infrastructure when it comes to buried infrastructure in earthquake and liquefaction-prone areas for the following reasons: • Technically more demanding inspections than those required for surface horizontal infrastructure • Infrastructure subject to both permanent ground displacement and transient ground deformation • Increase in network maintenance costs (i.e. deterioration due to ageing material and seismic hazard) These challenges suggest careful studies on network resilience will yield significant benefits. For these reasons, the potable water network of Christchurch city (Figure 1) has been selected for its well-characterized topology and its extensive repair dataset.
A video of a presentation by Ian Campbell, Executive General Manager of the Stronger Christchurch Rebuild Team (SCIRT), during the third plenary of the 2016 People in Disasters Conference. The presentation is titled, "Putting People at the Heart of the Rebuild".The abstract for this presentation reads: On the face of it, the Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team (SCIRT) is an organisation created to engineer and carry out approximately $2B of repairs to physical infrastructure over a 5-year period. Our workforce consists primarily of engineers and constructors who came from far and wide after the earthquakes to 'help fix Christchurch'. But it was not the technical challenges that drew them all here. It was the desire and ambition expressed in the SCIRT 'what we are here for' statement: 'to create resilient infrastructure that gives people security and confidence in the future of Christchurch'. For the team at SCIRT, people are at the heart of our rebuild programme. This is recognised in the intentional approach SCIRT takes to all aspects of its work. The presentation will touch upon how SCIRT communicated with communities affected by our work and how we planned and coordinated the programme to minimise the impacts, while maximising the value for both the affected communities and the taxpayers of New Zealand and rate payers of Christchurch funding it. The presentation will outline SCIRT's very intentional approach to supporting, developing, connecting, and enabling our people to perform, individually, and collectively, in the service of providing the best outcome for the people of Christchurch and New Zealand.
A review of the week's news including... An immigration lawyer says 'paying for jobs' is so rampant in New Zealand there needs to be a fresh look at powers available to officials, criminals are using sex to blackmail Indian male students, Auckland lays out its plan to spend 83 billion dollars on transport, the electrified section of the main trunk line between Auckland and Wellington could be mothballed, frustrated advocates are calling for better reporting of suicides committed by current and former members of the military, doctors say making voluntary euthanasia legal would involve many complex and difficult decisions and New Zealand should avoid it, the Morning Report Wellington mayoral candidates debate, a Maori fisheries body wants the Maori Party to abandon its support for the Government if plans for a Kermadec ocean sanctuary go ahead unchanged, Maori representation becomes a virtual no-go area for those vying for public office in New Plymouth, Colin Craig denies ever sending his former press secretary explicit text messages, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child raises concerns about the naming of the new children's ministry, MPs hear emotional pleas from the family of soldiers killed in action and buried in Malaysia for the government to bring their remains home, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band will perform in Christchurch on the eve of the sixth anniversary of the Canterbury earthquakes this summer and Prince Charles praises New Zealand soldiers who fought at the Somme at a centennary ceremony in Northern France.
Social media have changed disaster response and recovery in the way people inform themselves, provide community support and make sense of unfolding and past events online. During the Canterbury earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter became part of the story of the quakes in the region, as well as a basis for ongoing public engagement during the rebuild efforts in Christchurch. While a variety of research has been conducted on the use of social media in disaster situations (Bruns & Burgess, 2012; Potts, Seitzinger, Jones, & Harrison, 2011; Shklovski, Palen, & Sutton, 2008), studies about their uses in long-term disaster recovery and across different platforms are underrepresented. This research analyses networked practices of sensemaking around the Canterbury earthquakes over the course of disaster response, recovery and rebuild, focussing on Facebook and Twitter. Following a mixed methodological design data was gathered in interviews with people who started local Facebook pages, and through digital media methods of data collection and computational analysis of public Facebook pages and a historical Twitter dataset gathered around eight different earthquake-related events between 2010 and 2013. Data is further analysed through discursive and narrative tools of inquiry. This research sheds light on communication practices in the drawn-out process of disaster recovery on the ground in connecting different modes of discourse. Examining the ongoing negotiation of networked identities through technologically mediated social practices during Canterbury’s rebuild, the connection between online environments and the city of Christchurch, as a physical place, is unpacked. This research subsequently develops a new methodology to study social media platforms and provide new and detailed information on both the communication practices in issue-based online publics and the ongoing negotiation of the impact of the Canterbury earthquakes through networked digital means.
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.
A video of a presentation by Jai Chung during the Staff and Patients Stream of the 2016 People in Disasters Conference. The presentation is titled, "A Systematic Review of Compassion Fatigue of Nurses During and After the Canterbury Earthquakes".The abstract for the presentation reads as follows: Limited research is currently available about compassion fatigue of health professionals during and after disasters in New Zealand. The purpose of this systematic literature review was to provide a comprehensive outline of existing research. National and international literature was compared and contrasted to determine the importance of recognising compassion fatigue during and after disasters. Health professionals responding to disasters have played an important role in saving lives. Especially, during and after the Canterbury earthquakes, many health professionals cared for the traumatized public of the region. When responding to and caring for many distressed people, health professionals - particularly nurses - may strongly empathise with people's pain, fear, and distress. Consequently, they can be affected both emotionally and physically. Nurses may experience intensive and extreme distress and trauma directly and indirectly. Physical exhaustion can arise quickly. Emotional exhaustion such as hopelessness and helplessness may lead to nurses losing the ability to nurture and care for people during disasters. This can lead to compassion fatigue. It is important to understand how health professionals, especially nurses, experience compassion fatigue in order to help them respond to disasters appropriately. International literature explains the importance of recognising compassion fatigue in nursing, and explores different coping mechanisms that assist nurses overcome or prevent this health problem. In contrast, New Zealand literature is limited to experiences of nurses' attitudes in responding to natural disasters. In light of this, this literature review will help to raise awareness about the importance of recognising and addressing symptoms of compassion fatigue in a profession such as nursing. Gaps within the research will also be identified along with recommendations for future research in this area, especially from a New Zealand perspective. Please note that due to a recording error the sound cuts out at 9 minutes.