A pdf transcript of Flora Anni Mamaeroa Mcgregor (Flo)'s second earthquake story, captured by the UC QuakeBox Take 2 project. Interviewer: Destiny Wiringi. Transcriber: Maggie Blackwood.
This is St Peters Riccarton. It was damaged in one of the two big Earthquakes to hit Christchurch in September 2010 and February 2011. Its taken a LONG time for work to really get going, but now that it is, they are also upgrading and extending the church with a modern annexe.
The families of those who died in the CTV building's collapse during the Christchurch Earthquake in February of 2011 are vowing to continue their Fight For Justice after The Independent Police Conduct Authority rejected their complaint about the Police Investigation . The Police decided 3 years ago not to lay charges against the building's designer. Yesterday the families announced that the IPCA, the body that advised the Police, had told them that it had no jurisdiction over Crown Law. Families spokesperson, Maan Alkaisi, told reporter Conan Young that they will continue to push for somebody to be held to account. He wants a retired judge to take another look at the decision not to prosecute.
An inquiry into the Earthquake Commission has found it was poorly prepared for the Canterbury earthquakes - and has left people with a "deep mistrust of government" that will take years to overcome. The government has this morning released findings from the inquiry, chaired by Dame Silvia Cartwright. Our Christchurch reporter, Conan Young, has been reading through the details and spoke with Māni Dunlop.
Global biodiversity is threatened by human actions, including in urban areas. Urbanisation has removed and fragmented indigenous habitats. As one of the 25 biodiversity ’hot spots’, New Zealand is facing the problems of habitat loss and indigenous species extinction. In New Zealand cities, as a result of the land clearance and imported urban planning precepts, many urban areas have little or no original native forest remaining. Urbanisation has also been associated with the introduction of multitudes of species from around the world. Two large earthquakes shook Christchurch in 2010 and 2011 and caused a lot of damage. Parts of the city suffered from soil liquefaction after the earthquakes. In the most damaged parts of Christchurch, particularly in the east, whole neighbourhoods were abandoned and later demolished except for larger trees. Christchurch offers an excellent opportunity to study the biodiversity responses to an urban area with less intensive management, and to learn more about the conditions in urban environments that are most conducive to indigenous plant biodiversity. This study focuses on natural woody plant regeneration of forested sites in Christchurch city, many of which were also surveyed prior to the earthquakes. By repeating the pre-earthquake surveys, I am able to describe the natural regeneration occurring in Christchurch forested areas. By combining this with the regeneration that has occurred in the Residential Red Zone, successional trajectories can be described under a range of management scenarios. Using a comprehensive tree map of the Residential Red Zone, I was also able to document minimum dispersal distances of a range of indigenous trees in Christchurch. This is important for planning reserve connectivity. Moreover, I expand and improve on a previous analysis of the habitat connectivity of Christchurch (made before the earthquakes) to incorporate the Residential Red Zone, to assess the importance for habitat connectivity of restoring the indigenous forest in this area. In combination, these data sets are used to provide patch scenarios and some management options for biodiversity restoration in the Ōtākaro-Avon Red Zone post-earthquake.
Recent severe earthquakes, such as Christchurch earthquake series, worldwide have put emphasis on building resilience. In resilient systems, not only life is protected, but also undesirable economic effects of building repair or replacement are minimized following a severe earthquake. Friction connections are one way of providing structure resilience. These include the sliding hinge joint with asymmetric friction connections (SHJAFCs) in beam-to-column connections of the moment resisting steel frames (MRSFs), and the symmetric friction connections (SFCs) in braces of the braced frames. Experimental and numerical studies on components have been conducted internationally. However, actual building performance depends on the many interactions, occurring within a whole building system, which may be difficult to determine accurately by numerical modelling or testing of structural components alone. Dynamic inelastic testing of a full-scale multi-storey composite floor building with full range of non-structural elements (NSEs) has not yet been performed, so it is unclear if surprises are likely to occur in such a system. A 9 m tall three-storey configurable steel framed composite floor building incorporating friction-based connections is to be tested using two linked bi-directional shake tables at the International joint research Laboratory of Earthquake Engineering (ILEE) facilities, Shanghai, China. Beams and columns are designed to remain elastic during an earthquake event, with all non-linear behaviour occurring through stable sliding frictional behaviour, dissipating energy by SHJAFCs used in MRFs and SFCs in braced frames, with and without Belleville springs. Structural systems are configurable, allowing different moment and braced frame structural systems to be tested in two horizontal directions. In some cases, these systems interact with rocking frame or rocking column system in orthogonal directions subjected to unidirectional and bidirectional horizontal shaking. The structure is designed and detailed to undergo, at worst, minor damage under series of severe earthquakes. NSEs applied include precast-concrete panels, glass curtain walling, internal partitions, suspended ceilings, fire sprinkler piping as well as some other common contents. Some of the key design considerations are presented and discussed herein
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A story submitted by Melody to the QuakeStories website.
Seismic isolation is an effective technology for significantly reducing damage to buildings and building contents. However, its application to light-frame wood buildings has so far been unable to overcome cost and technical barriers such as susceptibility of light-weight buildings to movement under high-wind loading. The 1994 Northridge Earthquake (6.7 MW) in the United States, 1995 Kobe Earthquake (6.9 MW) in Japan and 2011 Christchurch Earthquake (6.7 Mw) all highlighted significant loss to light-frame wood buildings with over half of earthquake recovery costs allocated to their repair and reconstruction. This poster presents a value case to highlight the benefits of seismically isolated residential buildings compared to the standard fixed-base dwellings for the Wellington region. Loss data generated by insurance claim information from the 2011 Christchurch Earthquake has been used to determine vulnerability functions for the current light-frame wood building stock. By using a simplified single degree of freedom (SDOF) building model, methods for determining vulnerability functions for seismic isolated buildings are developed. Vulnerability functions are then applied directly in a loss assessment to determine the Expected Annual Loss. Vulnerability was shown to dramatically reduce for isolated buildings compared to an equivalent fixed-base building resulting in significant monetary savings, justifying the value case. A state-of-the-art timber modelling software, Timber3D, is then used to model a typical residential building with and without seismic isolation to assess the performance of a proposed seismic isolation system which addresses the technical and cost issues.
An report into EQC finds it was poorly prepared for the Canterbury earthquakes. Quarantined travelers have moved before 14 days. Anna Thomas has the news.
The performance of buildings in recent New Zealand earthquakes (Canterbury, Seddon and Kaikōura), delivered stark lessons on seismic resilience. Most of our buildings, with a few notable exceptions, performed as our Codes intended them to, that is, to safeguard people from injury. Many buildings only suffered minor structural damage but were unable to be reused and occupied for significant periods of time due to the damage and failure of non-structural elements. This resulted in substantial economic losses and major disruptions to our businesses and communities. Research has attributed the damage to poor overall design coordination, inadequate or lack of seismic restraints for non structural elements and insufficient clearances between building components to cater for the interaction of non structural elements under seismic actions. Investigations have found a clear connection between the poor performance of non-structural elements and the issues causing pain in the industry (procurement methods, risk aversion, the lack of clear understanding of design and inspection responsibility and the need for better alignment of the design codes to enable a consistent integrated design approach). The challenge to improve the seismic performance of non structural elements in New Zealand is a complex one that cuts across a diverse construction industry. Adopting the key steps as recommended in this paper is expected to have significant co-benefits to the New Zealand construction industry, with improvements in productivity alongside reductions in costs and waste, as the rework which plagues the industry decreases.
On 22 February 2011, Christchurch police sargeant Dave Harvey was outside the earthquake-damaged Hotel Grand Chancellor on Cashel Street, unsure if anyone was trapped inside. In case they were, he grabbed a can of spray paint and painted 'Help is on the way' in one-metre high letters on the road. Harvey's quick thinking really helped the people trapped in the hotel, says Clare Mackey, producer of the new documentary Help is on the Way.
The Supreme Court has ruled that a class action by Canterbury insurance holders against Southern Response can go ahead. Ali Jones, insurance claimants advocate explains to The Panel what this means for home owners who've been fighting for years to get their fair entitlements.
After a high-intensity seismic event, inspections of structural damages need to be carried out as soon as possible in order to optimize the emergency management, as well as improving the recovery time. In the current practice, damage inspections are performed by an experienced engineer, who physically inspect the structures. This way of doing not only requires a significant amount of time and high skilled human resources, but also raises the concern about the inspector’s safety. A promising alternative is represented using new technologies, such as drones and artificial intelligence, which can perform part of the damage classification task. In fact, drones can safely access high hazard components of the structures: for instance, bridge piers or abutments, and perform the reconnaissance by using highresolution cameras. Furthermore, images can be automatically processed by machine learning algorithms, and damages detected. In this paper, the possibility of applying such technologies for inspecting New Zealand bridges is explored. Firstly, a machine-learning model for damage detection by performing image analysis is presented. Specifically, the algorithm was trained to recognize cracks in concrete members. A sensitivity analysis was carried out to evaluate the algorithm accuracy by using database images. Depending on the confidence level desired,i.e. by allowing a manual classification where the alghortim confidence is below a specific tolerance, the accuracy was found reaching up to 84.7%. In the second part, the model is applied to detect the damage observed on the Anzac Bridge (GPS coordinates -43.500865, 172.701138) in Christchurch by performing a drone reconnaissance. Reults show that the accuracy of the damage detection was equal to 88% and 63% for cracking and spalling, respectively.
There are 1,600 Canterbury homeowners with earthquake claims still open with EQC. About 100 homeowners turned up to a meeting organised by EQC Fix in Christchurch on Monday night - all with stories of home repair hell, botched repairs, or seemingly never-ending arguments with EQC, Southern Response, or their private insurer. They were all tired and wondering why they still had to fight more than nine years on from the first Canterbury Earthquake. Checkpoint video journalist Logan Church travelled to Christchurch to speak to those still fighting for what they believe they are entitled too.
A scathing inquiry into the Earthquake Commission's handling of the 2010 and 2011 Canterbury earthquakes could mean huge change for how it handles claims. The Government says it's committed to implementing all of the recommendations from the inquiry, including improving its communication, planning and preparedness and dispute resolution. John Goddard, an insurance and employment law barrister who dealt with more than 4000 claims at the time, says repairs were handled poorly and the new recommendations won't cover all the bases. John Goddard and Melanie Bourke of EQC Fix speak to Corin Dann.
Recovery from disasters is a significant issue faced by all countries in the world at various times. Governments, including central and local governments, are the key actors regarding post-disaster recovery because they have the authority and responsibility to rescue affected people and recover affected areas (Yang, 2010). Planning is a critical step in the recovery process and provides the basis for defining a shared vision for recovery, clear objectives and intended results. Subsequently, the concept of collaborative planning and ‘build back better’ are highly desirable in recovery planning. However, in practice, these concepts are difficult to achieve. A brief description of the recovery planning in Christchurch City following the Canterbury earthquakes 2011 is provided as an example and comparison. This research aims to analyse the planning process to develop a post-disaster recovery plan in Indonesia using Mataram City’s recovery plan following the Lombok Earthquakes 2018 as the case study. It will emphasise on the roles of the central and local governments and whether they collaborate or not, and the implications of decentralisation for recovery planning. The methodology comprised a combination of legislation analysis and semi-structure interviews with the representatives of the central and local governments who were involved in the planning process. The results indicate that there was no collaboration between the central and local governments when developing the recovery plan, with the former tend to dominate and control the planning process. It is because there are regulatory and institutional problems concerning disaster management in Indonesia. In order to improve the implementation of disaster management and develop a better recovery plan, some recommendations are proposed. These include amendments the disaster management law and regulations to provide a clear guideline regarding the roles and responsibilities of both the central and local governments. It is also imperative to improve the capacity and capability of the local governments in managing disaster.
INTRODUCTION: After the 2011 Canterbury earthquake, the provision of school social work was extended into a larger number of schools in the greater Christchurch region to support discussions of their practice priorities and responses in post-earthquake schools. FINDINGS: Two main interpretations of need are reflected in the school social workers’ accounts of their work with children and families. Firstly, hardship-focused need, which represented children as adversely influenced by their home circumstances; the interventions were primarily with parents. These families were mainly from schools in low socioeconomic areas. Secondly, anxiety-based need, a newer practice response, which emphasised children who were considered particularly susceptible to the impacts of the disaster event. This article considers how these practitioners conceptualised and responded to the needs of the children and their families in this context. METHOD: A qualitative study examining recovery policy and school social work practice following the earthquakes including 12 semi-structured interviews with school social workers. This article provides a Foucauldian analysis of the social worker participants’ perspectives on emotional and psychological issues for children, particularly those from middle-class families; the main interventions were direct therapeutic work with children themselves. Embedded within these practice accounts are moments in which the social workers contested the predominant, individualising conceptualisations of need to enable more open-ended, negotiable, interconnected relationships in post-earthquake schools. IMPLICATIONS: In the aftermath of disasters, school social workers can reflect on their preferred practice responses and institutional influences in schools to offer children and families opportunities to reject the prevalent norms of risk and vulnerability.
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New Zealand has a long tradition of using light timber frame for construction of its domestic dwellings. After the most recent earthquakes (e.g. Canterbury earthquakes sequence), wooden residential houses showed satisfactory life safety performance which aligns with New Zealand design codes requirements. However, poor performance was reported in terms of their seismic resilience that can be generally associated with community demands. Future expectations of the seismic performance of wooden-framed houses by homeowners were assessed in this research. Homeowners in the Wellington region were asked in a survey about the levels of safety and expected possible damage in their houses after a seismic event. Findings bring questions about whether New Zealand code requirements are good enough to satisfy community demands. Also, questions whether available information of strengthening techniques to structurally prepare wooden-framed houses to face future major earthquakes can help to make homeowners feel safer at home during major seismic events.
Earthquakes cause significant damage to buildings due to strong vibration of the ground. Levitating houses using magnets and electromagnets would provide a complete isolation of ground motion for protecting buildings from seismic damage. Two types of initial configuration for the electromagnet system were proposed with the same air gap (10mm) between the electromagnet and reluctance plate. Both active and passive controller are modelled to investigate the feasibility of using a vibration control system for stabilizing the magnetic system within the designed air gap (10mm) in the vertical direction. A nonlinear model for the magnetic system is derived to implement numerical simulation of structural response under the earthquake record in Christchurch Botanic Gardens on 21 February 2011. The performance of the uncontrolled and the controlled systems are compared and the optimal combination of control gains are determined for the PID active controller. Simulation results show both active PID controller with constant and nonlinear attracting force are able to provide an effective displacement control within the required air gap (+/-5mm). The maximum control force demand for the PID controller in the presence of nonlinear attracting force is 4.1kN, while the attracting force in equilibrium position is 10kN provided by the electromagnet. These results show the feasibility of levitating a house using the current electromagnet and PID controller. Finally, initial results of passive control using two permanent magnets or dampers show the structural responses can be effectively reduced and centralized to +/-1mm using a nonlinear centring barrier function.
National's new deputy leader Gerry Brownlee discusses today's resignations from Nikki Kaye and Amy Adams, his track record in helping Christchurch earthquake claimants, and National's plans for the Auckland Central electorate.
What are the lessons from the Christchurch earthquakes? The Government was slow in their quake response, but does that mean we should give more property market power to the private sector?
A wide range of reinforced concrete (RC) wall performance was observed following the 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquakes, with most walls performing as expected, but some exhibiting undesirable and unexpected damage and failure characteristics. A comprehensive research programme, funded by the Building Performance Branch of the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, and involving both numerical and experimental studies, was developed to investigate the unexpected damage observed in the earthquakes and provide recommendations for the design and assessment procedures for RC walls. In particular, the studies focused on the performance of lightly reinforced walls; precast walls and connections; ductile walls; walls subjected to bi-directional loading; and walls prone to out-of-plane instability. This paper summarises each research programme and provides practical recommendations for the design and assessment of RC walls based on key findings, including recommended changes to NZS 3101 and the NZ Seismic Assessment Guidelines.
The earthquake engineering community is currently grappling with the need to improve the post-earthquake reparability of buildings. As part of this, proposals exist to change design criteria for the serviceability limit state (SLS). This paper reviews options for change and considers how these could impact the expected repair costs for typical New Zealand buildings. The expected annual loss (EAL) is selected as a relevant measure or repair costs and performance because (i) EAL provides information on the performance of a building considering a range of intensity levels, (ii) the insurance industry refers to EAL when setting premiums, and (iii) monetary losses are likely to be correlated with loss of building functionality. The paper argues that because the expected annual loss is affected by building performance over a range of intensity levels, the definition of SLS criteria alone may be insufficient to effectively limit losses. However, it is also explained that losses could be limited effectively if the loadings standard were to set the SLS design intensity considering the potential implications on EAL. It is shown that in order to achieve similar values of EAL in Wellington and Christchurch, the return period intensity for SLS design would need to be higher in Christchurch owing to differences in local hazard conditions. The observations made herein are based on a simplified procedure for EAL estimation and hence future research should aim to verify the findings using a detailed loss assessment approach applied to a broad range of case study buildings.
Rapid, accurate structural health monitoring (SHM) assesses damage to optimise decision-making. Many SHM methods are designed to track nonlinear stiffness changes as damage. However, highly nonlinear pinched hysteretic systems are problematic in SHM. Model-based SHM often fails as any mismatch between model and measured response dynamics leads to significant error. Thus, modelfree methods of hysteresis loop tracking methods have emerged. This study compares the robustness and accuracy in the presence of significant measurement noise of the proven hysteresis loop analysis (HLA) SHM method with 3 emerging model-free methods and 2 further novel adaptations of these methods using a highly nonlinear, 6-story numerical structure to provide a known ground-truth. Mean absolute errors in identifying a known nonlinear stiffness trajectory assessed at four points over two successive ground motion inputs from September 2010 and February 2011 in Christchurch range from 1.71-10.52%. However, the variability is far wider with maximum errors ranging from 3.90-49.72%, where the second largest maximum absolute error was still 19.74%. The lowest mean and maximum absolute errors were for the HLA method. The next best method had mean absolute error of 2.92% and a maximum of 10.51%. These results show the clear superiority of the HLA method over all current emerging model-free methods designed to manage the highly nonlinear pinching responses common in reinforced concrete structures. These results, combined with high robustness and accuracy in scaled and fullscale experimental studies, provide further validation for using HLA for practical implementation.
When an “I thought I was going to die quake” occurs amidst four additional major earthquakes and 15,000 aftershocks during a sixteen-month period, it challenges people’s ability to cope and recover. Residents of Canterbury, New Zealand endured this extended, chaotic state in 2010/11; and continue to deal with lingering effects on their devastated central city, Christchurch. Stress and coping theory suggests that finding meaning in such situations can help people recover, and that religion and spirituality often play a role in post-disaster resilience. Despite this, there is very little research literature examining this phenomenon and even less that considers spirituality separate from religion. This research focuses on this underrepresented area by considering the personal spiritual or meaningful experiences of people in post-earthquake Canterbury. Data from sixteen in-depth, minimally directed interviews were thematically analyzed to understand each individual’s meaning construction and coping/recovery process and identify connective themes and patterns amongst their experiences. Four core elements of acceptance, clarity and choice, connection, and transcendence emerged from the thematic analysis to conceptualize a model of transcendent coping. Transcendent coping represents an additional type of coping in the transactional model of stress and coping, which serves to support the previous denoted problem-, emotion-, and meaning-focused coping approaches. Transcendent coping offers openness, empowerment, comfort and expansion not necessarily reliant upon theistic or religious beliefs and practices. Rather, this secular spiritual coping is inherent in everyday, mundane practices such as being in the moment, aligning to and acting from personal values, connecting to that and those who bring comfort, and experiencing transcendence in moments of awe and expansion. This research contributes to the growing interest in spirituality as an important facet of human nature that can support wellbeing in the face of stress.
Christchurch’s architecture, both new and old, has been brought to life in an illustrated walking book that pays homage to the city’s historical buildings and showcases its new direction in the post-earthquake era.
Post-earthquake cordons have been used after seismic events around the world. However, there is limited understanding of cordons and how contextual information of place such as geography, socio-cultural characteristics, economy, institutional and governance structure etc. affect decisions, operational procedures as well as spatial and temporal attributes of cordon establishment. This research aims to fill that gap through a qualitative comparative case study of two cities: Christchurch, New Zealand (Mw 6.2 earthquake, February 2011) and L’Aquila, Italy (Mw 6.3 earthquake, 2009). Both cities suffered comprehensive damage to its city centre and had cordons established for extended period. Data collection was done through purposive and snowball sampling methods whereby 23 key informants were interviewed in total. The interviewee varied in their roles and responsibilities i.e. council members, emergency managers, politicians, business/insurance representatives etc. We found that cordons were established to ensure safety of people and to maintain security of place in both the sites. In both cities, the extended cordon was met with resistance and protests. The extent and duration of establishment of cordon was affected by recovery approach taken in the two cities i.e. in Christchurch demolition was widely done to support recovery allowing for faster removal of cordons where as in L’Aquila, due to its historical importance, the approach to recovery was based on saving all the buildings which extended the duration of cordon. Thus, cordons are affected by site specific needs. It should be removed as soon as practicable which could be made easier with preplanning of cordons.
Christchurch residents forced away from their redzone homes returned today for the unveiling of the the Avon loop pathway - the first redevelopment, nine years on from the deadly earthquake. Reporter Conan Young went along to hear from them.