Governing through a crisis is the hallmark of effective disaster management. This is even truer at a local government level. “We are the city - if we’re not functioning, then neither is the city”.
The Christchurch Civic Building was redeveloped for the Christchurch City Council by Ngai Tahu Property Ltd, one of New Zealand’s largest property owners, and opened in 2010. With a value over $100 million and built to full modern code design, the offices house the critical core operations of the Council, including more than 1,250 staff and the civic chambers.
Following the major February 2011 earthquake (that cost 182 lives and $50B of damage) the Council was internationally lauded for its immense task of restoring the city’s lifelines of water, waste water and roads.
The Council managed this despite having to evacuate its new premises for several months while structural engineering assessments, requiring primarily minor architectural repairs, were completed. The disruption resulting from this full and prolonged evacuation was significant - and largely unnecessary - but at the time there was no justifiable alternative.
Christchurch City Council: negligible downtime through 10,000 quakes
Determined not to repeat the experience, NTPL installed a full CSI Structural
Monitoring solution. Sensor points throughout the building connected to
the central recording system, which instantly analysed and reported shaking levels against building-specific thresholds for stay/evacuate alerts. Status was displayed immediately for the building manager with SMS and email messages to key people including the building owner, building manager and building engineer. 0The system was active through thousands of aftershocks and two M6 quakes in December 2011. CSI delivered:
- Clear criteria for “no action needed” and escalating emergency response action based on building-specific knowledge
- Instant and streamlined decision making - stay/evacuate
- Instant structural performance reports to the building engineer
- Zero further evacuations
- Maximum staff and public confidence
- Maximum continuing city governance and core service capacity
- No addition to economic disruption
- Maximum ongoing earthquake resilience and economic support for a devastated city
Gordon Craig, Development Manager NTPL: “Our primary concern is safety, and the system greatly assists in decision making related to the level of timing of repopulating the building. Of further benefit… …is that data on
structural behaviour should contribute to future seismic design. The installed system also enables Christchurch City Council to immediately know the level of impact within the city’s Central Business District”.
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