
Photograph captioned by Fairfax, "Urban Search and Rescue workers remove the insides of the historic MLC building built in 1906 on the corner of Manchester/Hereford Streets. The seven storey building will be demolished as it is at risk of collapsing".
Photograph captioned by Fairfax, "Urban Search and Rescue workers remove the insides of the historic MLC building built in 1906 on the corner of Manchester/Hereford Streets. The seven storey building will be demolished as it is at risk of collapsing".
Photograph captioned by Fairfax, "Urban Search and Rescue workers remove the insides of the historic MLC building built in 1906 on the corner of Manchester/Hereford Streets. The seven storey building will be demolished as it is at risk of collapsing".
Photograph captioned by Fairfax, "Urban Search and Rescue workers remove the insides of the historic MLC building built in 1906 on the corner of Manchester/Hereford Streets. The seven storey building will be demolished as it is at risk of collapsing".
Photograph captioned by Fairfax, "Urban Search and Rescue workers remove the insides of the historic MLC building built in 1906 on the corner of Manchester and Hereford Streets. The seven-storey building will be demolished as it is at risk of collapsing".
At 4.35 a.m. on the 4th of September 2010 Christchurch residents were shaken awake by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake, the largest earthquake to hit urban New Zealand for nearly 80 years. It was a large earthquake. On average the world only has 17 earthquakes a year larger than magnitude seven. Haiti’s earthquake in January 2010 was magnitude 7.1 and Chile’s earthquake in February was magnitude 8.8. Although it was a big quake, Christchurch was lucky. In Haiti’s earthquake over 230,000 people were killed and in Chile 40,000 homes were destroyed. Happily this was not the situation in Christchurch, however the earthquake has caused considerable damage. The challenge for the Landscape Architecture community is to contribute to the city’s reconstruction in ways that will not only fix the problems of housing, and the city’s urban, suburban and neighbourhood fabric but that will do so in ways that will help solve the landscape problems that dogged the city before the earthquake struck.
Among the deformation features produced in Christchurch by the September 4th Darfield Earthquake were numerous and widespread “sand volcanoes”. Most of these structures occurred in urban settings and “erupted” through a hardened surface of concrete or tarseal, or soil. Sand volcanoes were also widespread in the Avon‐ Heathcote Estuary and offered an excellent opportunity to readily examine shallow subsurface profiles and as such the potential appearance of such structures in the rock record.