The Christchurch Earthquake Sequence at 15 Webinar Transcript
This webinar presents the reflections from four prominent New Zealand-based disaster and resilience scholars on the significance of the Christchurch Earthquake Sequence. This conversation marked the 15th anniversary of the Christchurch Earthquake Sequence for the Natural Hazards Center's Disasters as Turning Points webinar series.
See a full transcript of the webinar conversation below.
Anna Canny (Natural Hazards Center): Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. My name is Anna Canny, I'm the science communications lead here at the Natural Hazard Center, and this is a new series that we're doing. The Disasters as Turning Points series, and so thanks for joining us as we launch it.
The goal here is really to create a space where we can have reflective conversations on some of the events that have inspired changes in the hazards and disasters field. So that's our goal here today. This was really born out of a plenary session we had at the 50th Annual Natural Hazards Workshop last summer that you can check out, a plenary by the same name, where we asked some scholars to share their reflections on some of the events that have changed our field. And so, yeah, we wanted to build on the momentum of that. And I will just drop in the chat the series webpage, but, we're going to be having a bunch more of these this year. And so, if you head to the link here, you can find the schedule for all these conversations we're putting together, and I hope you'll join us for future conversations.
A bit of housekeeping. Today's webinar will be recorded, and so we will be posting it on the series webpage, as well as, we'll send a follow-up to those who registered for Zoom, which is everyone on this call, with a recording, so you can watch it later, or share with folks who weren't able to join us at this time today. I also want to thank everyone who submitted audience questions ahead of time. We have incorporated those into the arc of our discussion today, and so, thank you for your insights there. We'll try to address as many as possible, and we'll leave some time at the end, hopefully to take some more questions that you might, come up with as you're listening to our conversation today.
So today, as I mentioned, this is the first official Disasters as Turning Points session, and what we'll be talking about today is the Christchurch Earthquake Sequence, also known as the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence. And we're joined today by some leading experts, disaster research and resilience experts from New Zealand. And I'll have our speakers introduce themselves more, but we're joined by Sarah Beavan, Ken Elwood, Julia Becker and Tom Wilson. We're really excited to have their insights, and they all were directly involved in response to this event 15 years ago. The anniversary of this event passed just a couple of days ago on February 22nd, and so we want to take the time to mark its significance.
So I'll stop screen sharing, and just so you can see our lovely panelists.
Just a bit more context setting. So, some of the reasons why we want to mark this particular event: It was a major urban earthquake. It struck extremely close to the city, and it was very shallow, which led to some really intense shaking in Christchurch and the nearby rural communities.
185 people were killed, mainly, due to the collapse of an office building downtown, near the city center. And that central business district was completely closed for several years, or largely closed for several years. There was a massive long-term rebuilding effort, that has changed the city, and we'll get into some of that. It was also the costliest disaster in New Zealand's history, costing about $40 billion, New Zealand dollars. And insurers, interestingly, covered about 80% of this funding, so that… that was unique, and it played a role in shaping the rebuild and recovery.
It also has really important international implications that I just want to take a moment to talk about, because here in the U.S, the possibility of a Christchurch magnitude earthquake, directly beneath an American city is something that a lot of urban planners and, people in this space, I'm sure many of you are aware of and concerned about, so major cities like Memphis, Los Angeles, Portland, Salt Lake, San Francisco, and Seattle all are pretty close to fault lines that have been known to produce large earthquakes in the past. So the lessons that we can learn from this example of the Christchurch Earthquake will be relevant globally.
Okay, so I'll pass it over now to our lovely speakers. They were all involved directly, as I said, in research response to the Canterbury earthquake sequence, and they have a lot to share. So without further ado, maybe we can start with Sarah, and you can all just talk a little bit about, your work and some of your significant memories from the days and weeks after the earthquake. Anything you'd like to share.
Sarah Beaven (University of Canterbury): Thanks, Anna! Kia ora, hi everyone. I just wanted to start by, thanking the Boulder team, and especially Anna, for organising this webinar to mark the 15-year milestone. I also wanted to thank you for inviting me to join the panel. It's a real privilege, to be part of it.
So, I'm an academic based in the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Canterbury, where I co-direct the Disaster Risk and Resilience programs. I'm a trained social scientist, and I draw pretty heavily from science and technology studies and public administration theory, in my work. I'm particularly interested in the ways in which governance and institutional arrangements constrain disaster risk management decision-making, and including the involvement of science and researchers in decision-making processes.
After the Christchurch earthquake, I also served as a social science liaison, with response and recovery efforts, and this was a kind of interface role between scientific and practitioner communities, first with the response effort and then based out of the Earthquake Recovery Authority, which was established to coordinate the recovery from 2011 to 2015. And this was something of an embedded role for me, because at the same time, I was also researching scientific engagement with response and recovery actors. And the research coordinating role played by, a consortium of research organisations, which was called the Natural Hazards Research Platform, or "the platform," in short.
I think Anna also suggested we might like to share a few memories. I was born in Christchurch, I've lived here a lot of my life. And, I guess one of my more intense memories immediately after the earthquake was walking home about an hour later. And out at the university where we were, the shaking wasn't as intense as it was in the central city, so it wasn't until I got to this big park, Hagley Park in the middle of the city, that we became aware of this eerie wailing sound, and we realized that it was thousands and thousands of car alarms going off continuously because the ground was shaking, it was setting off all the cars. And at the same time, we kind of ran into about 12 people wrapped in hospital blankets. And when we talked to them, they said that they were being prepped for surgery, and then suddenly their surgery was canceled, and they were told they had to walk home because the roads were gridlocked, and there was no time for them to put on their clothes or, gather their belongings. So they were just walking home in their hospital gowns and wrapped in blankets. And I think, when I was listening to them, I sort of realized that this earthquake was way worse than anything that had gone before in the sequence. And it really felt to me as if I'd suddenly dropped through into some kind of new reality, and I still remember that feeling, really clearly. So, that's me. I think that's it. My three minutes are up. Thanks, Anna. Cheers.
Julia Becker (Massey University): Kia ora koutou! I'll go on, from Sarah Beavan. So I'm Julia Becker from the Joint Centre for Disaster Research at Massey University. And, when I was, with the…during the Canterbury earthquake sequence, I was actually at GNS Science, our Earth Science Research Institute, so in a slightly different organization. I'm currently also affiliated with QuakeCore, I'm one of the directors there, and our newly established Natural Hazards Resilience Platform. Yeah, I guess I'd just like to also acknowledge all of the people who passed away during the events, and all of the first responders, and the response from the general sector, including the scientists, which was massive. And there were a lot of people undertaking thankless tasks for a really long time, so I see you all, and I definitely acknowledge some of the input that all of those people had following the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence, or during the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence.
I'd just also like to acknowledge my colleague, the late David Johnston, who was heavily involved in responding to the Canterbury Earthquakes. He's a fellow researcher with me here at Massey University, at the Joint Centre for Disaster Research. He went down and he lived through the earthquakes, and was involved in some of the science response and coordinating that, and in some of the, actual response, at the time. So, yeah, just massive, massive, input from him, and wanted to acknowledge that.
As a bit of background, while I was at GNS, I was doing some research in Canterbury before the earthquakes, so I was really interested in understanding earthquake preparedness for the Canterbury region. It was part of my PhD research. And so I'd been down there working with the local emergency management group to try and understand how prepared people were for these, for an earthquake that might happen in future, not expecting one to happen at all. And so that was how I sort of became involved with the group down there before the earthquakes.
But then the Christchurch earthquake happened. And one of the main areas, I guess, I got involved with was some of the research coordination. And also, I saw a really big gap in some of the communication that we were doing around the earthquake sequence, and got involved in some of the research to try and better understand that so we could communicate about the earthquake sequence better. So that was… that was my involvement and my background.
Anna Canny: Ken, maybe you want to jump in.
Ken Elwood (University of Aukland): Sure, I'll, I'll jump in here. Thanks very much, Anna, for organizing and for inviting me along. As you can tell from my accent, I am not a Kiwi, born and bred, as my fellow panelists, but I'm honored to be here.
At the time of the earthquake, I was actually a professor at University of British Columbia, in Vancouver. I'm a structural engineer, by training, and my background, I guess, within structural engineering, is the performance of buildings during earthquakes, particularly the performance of older concrete and masonry buildings. About, 12 years ago, I moved to the University of Auckland as a professor in structural engineering, and I now, serve as the chief engineer within the, New Zealand government.
But that personal and professional journey started in the Christchurch CBD (Central Business District.) I happened to be there, on the corner of Cashel and High Street, when the earthquake hit, and, watched a building fall apart in front of my eyes. It's not something you easily forget.
I stuck around, supported, building inspections in the city, for a few weeks. And it's amazing to come face-to-face with those things that you've been researching for years. To see the damage to the buildings, and as engineers we get excited about broken concrete. But for me, much more so, to suddenly be faced with the wider implications of this earthquake, the societal implications, the wider city implications, the closure of the central business district, and so suddenly my eyes were open to something much more than what I had been exposed to as an engineer previously. And I think that that experience was quite fulfilling for me, both personally and professionally, and has influenced the direction of my career and directly led to me moving here to New Zealand and the role I'm playing now.
So, Anna, thank you for organizing this and inviting me along, and I look forward to the discussion in the rest of the hour.
Tom Wilson (University of Canterbury): Kia ora. My name is Tom Wilson. I'm a professor of disaster risk and resilience at the University of Canterbury, which is a university based here in Ōtautahi Christchurch. And I'm also the, Chief Science Advisor for the New Zealand National Emergency Management Agency.
Can I just say a huge thank you as well, echoing fellow panellists, to Anna and Lori and the Natural Hazard Center team for organising this. It's been lovely, actually, being able to engage and prepare for it. New Zealand's actually in a disaster recovery at the moment from a severe weather event, so it was… it's been very timely to revisit some of these things.
And I guess just wanted to really echo what Sarah and others have said around just thoughts with those that were directly affected by the disaster, and those that still are, because it's the… there's a very long tail and echoes to these things.
At the time of the earthquake, I was a freshly-minted, PhD that had just, just graduated similar to Julia and so many others on the panel, but also on the call, as one of David Johnston's many, many, graduate students. I had just been appointed at the University of Canterbury in a continuing role, as a disaster academic.
I think the memories that I would like to share is that we'd been going really hard for three or four months after the Darfield Earthquake, which was in September 2010. And my memory of the day was it was the first day off I'd taken off since Christmas, and I remember being at home with my now-wife. And this earthquake hit, and it sounded different. There was this deep, deep rumbling, and, we were in a light timber structure home, and I just remember seeing, one of the wood beams flexing in a way that I just thought, how on earth is this not breaking? As the shaking hit. And I remember, it just happened that wife and I were together, and we were sort of hanging on to each other, and hearts racing, and the TV's wobbling and falling, and things are crashing around, and thinking, 'Oh, dear, this is… this is bad. This is going to be much worse than we've seen before.'
And similar to Sarah, went into town to see if it could contribute to what I assumed the Emergency Operations center was stood up, and was just confronted with the most, haunting sight of these patients coming out of the hospital, in gowns. And, so I didn't actually know that Sarah had had a similar experience, despite working with her very, very closely for 15 years.
My role, I guess was probably best described as a bit of a generalist. I was involved in a lot of the science liaison and communication work. I was on the science desk, at times, trying to support coordination between the research and science systems with the emergency response.
I had the privilege of being involved in a lot of the critical infrastructure research, and that's been ongoing, which has been fascinating. A lot of work with the wonderful ResOrgs team, and I see a few of them on the call today, looking at some of the business behaviour and organisational impacts, which has turned out to be a critically important empirical dataset, and so it was really cool to be involved in that.
And then, one area which is a confronting one, but one that, again, has been very valuable, was a lot of casualty analysis, with David Johnston and other public health researchers, of what were the causes of injuries during the earthquake sequence? Which was very confronting but rewarding work. And then, since, the, I guess in sort of later times, I've been very interested around the very complex multi-hazard risk components that have affected the recovery, with the implications around subsidence that's occurred in the eastern Christchurch areas, which has led to effective sea level rise of about 50 years equivalent, which has led to really complex, interesting facets of the recovery. So it's a real privilege to be here today. Thank you so much for having us, and really looking forward to the discussion.
Anna Canny: Yes, well, thank you to all our panelists. I'll just echo all of this gratitude going around for joining us today. It's really, really a privilege to hear, especially your personal experiences. Ken, what you said struck me about, you know, folks researching this day in and day out, and then it's another thing to be confronted with it on a street corner, you know? So that's a unique experience, thank you for sharing it. So, to get us started, I have a very general question. We've talked a little bit in my, you know, when we started the webinar about some of the specific impacts of this events. But I want to talk a little bit about why, what made this particular earthquake so impactful, and I'm wondering if we can start by characterizing, sort of, risk perception before and after, say, in January 2011, before the earthquake struck versus after, and in the years since. And Sarah, or I mean, Julia, I know you've done a lot of work here. I think you'll all want to chime in, but maybe we could start with you.
What was risk perception like, and how was it changed by this particular earthquake?
Julia Becker: Yeah, I think, just given the context, the background, it had been, sort of, about 70 years since the last big earthquake in a populated area since the Napier Earthquake. So we'd had a really long period of not many big earthquakes impacting lots of populations, and so Canterbury hadn't had a lot of big earthquakes in the recent past before that event.
And some of the work that I did surveying the population to try and understand whether they were, whether they understood the risk and whether they were prepared really showed that, yeah, the levels of risk perception around earthquakes, the understanding around earthquakes was pretty low. And the preparedness was even lower. So, depends on what figure you look, it can be anywhere between about 13% to 30% preparedness, so quite low preparedness for earthquakes specifically.
Some other really good work that was done, by Sara McBride was really looking at, sort of, the public education campaigns before the earthquakes, trying to see what kind of impact those had had on getting people prepared. And she really found that because they'd focus so much on the risk and the hazard, the science-y kind of parts of the earthquakes and less on the preparedness part. That was perhaps one of the reasons why people hadn't actually got prepared. They kind of hadn't really translated that risk into understanding how to prepare. Might have been a little bit fatalistic as well about it. The earthquake's too big, I can't do anything about it.
So yeah, that was kind of the background context, really. People probably weren't really very well prepared, either mentally or physically.
Anna Canny: If anyone else wants to chime in. Yes, please, Sarah.
Sarah Beaven: Just a brief comment to add to Julia's. I mean, I think that's the before, and I think visibly afterwards, you can see how the central city's been almost completely replaced, really, and the buildings that replaced it are all quite distinctively sort of low-rise, and they've got enormous, kind of, strengthening beams across the front and inside, and so on. And to me, it's almost like the entire city, you can see it, sort of, like it's a bit scarred, but it's really fortified. It's kind of, like, armored, in a way, against earthquakes, in a way that really draws your attention whenever you're in there. So, yeah. I think afterwards, clearly, the risk perception is high, yeah.
Ken Elwood: I might just add to that, sort of an example of how, risk perception has changed, I think, is captured in what we call our earthquake-prone building policy. So this is essentially a national policy that governs the retrofit of existing buildings, essentially similar to ordinances in the U.S. that are done for unreinforced masonry buildings or non-ductile concrete buildings. But this is a national program.
Prior to the Christchurch earthquakes, the program was essentially voluntary, so different territorial authorities, including Christchurch, would define how they were going to address earthquake-prone buildings. But it was… it was essentially voluntary. And there was very little retrofit actually happening. After the Christchurch Earthquakes, there was a strong recognition of the need to start to get more active on the retrofit of buildings, and there was perhaps a pendulum swing. And while very well-intentioned, the new system was actually, quite strict, and a lot of buildings that we never would have anticipated would have required retrofit were captured within the system. And, the system almost became unworkable, because it was capturing too many buildings because of that pendulum swing.
Well, we're right now reviewing that earthquake-prone building policy, and we're seeing the pendulum swinging back again, and we're hoping we'll, you know, stop that pendulum before it swings all the way back into something that's a more risk-focused, you know, focusing on the worst buildings and something that's a bit more proportionate to the risk that the buildings pose. But still trying to focus on getting retrofits done, so that we, as opposed to what we had before the Christchurch Earthquake. But, yeah, I really caution about this pendulum swing that happens as you react to these sorts of events. And I think it's captured in that system, and how it's changed.
Tom Wlison: I wonder, Anna, if I could just quickly add a short comment of just riffing off the lovely comments the other three have made, I think I'd really like to draw attention to just how extraordinary this event was, in terms of it exceeding so much of what had perhaps been designed for or planned for in the New Zealand system. I say this with all the brave confidence of being a Kiwi, but the New Zealand, you know, New Zealand was hardly in a low state of preparedness for disasters, and particularly seismic disasters. There was relatively strong building codes, there had been good thinking in some cases around land use planning with respect to this, but the exceptional high ground shaking that occurred from an earthquake directly underneath the city, the extensive liquefaction ground damage that occurred, and the rockfall and landslides on the hills of the southern parts of Christchurch, you know, I think it really led to quite a shock to both decision makers and communities as to how to deal with that. And not just that it was a one-off event, this was part of a complex earthquake sequence with multiple complex, hazards or phenomena that needed quite robust thinking, but also how they compounded together.
And so that, you know, the challenges across land use, the built environment, as Ken has alluded to, but particularly the economy and communities, was really challenging, and I think that was quite an exceptional component of this event, and one that, to be frank, we're probably still struggling to really grapple and grasp those key lessons with today.
Anna Canny, Natural Hazards Center: Yeah, thank you all there for your wonderful responses. I think one thing that's really interesting to point out here, with Ken's comment is, you know, we have the perspective of 70 years of relative quiet this event, and now 15 years out, how does risk perception fluctuate over that whole time period? So I think you did a lovely job, you know, speaking to that.
Switching gears slightly, one of the things we're really hoping to do with this series, as I mentioned, is talk about how it changed the hazards and disaster field, generally. And, since we're largely interested in what we learn from the Christchurch earthquake sequence, it feels appropriate to spend a bit of time on how we learned it, and so I want to talk a little bit about the research response.
And Sarah, I know you've done a bunch of work with this. I'm, again, inviting all the panelists to chime in, but maybe I'll start with you. Could you talk a little bit about how post-disaster research unfolded in the wake of this event?
Sarah Beaven: Sure. So, just to build on, what Tom was saying earlier, that actually this event came 6 months in, so you already had this enormous surge of research interest from, particularly from disaster specialists international and national, 6 months earlier. So, when this event occurred, it kind of really escalated the surge. So, and I think it did that in a way because, partly, it created a spike in demand for additional researchers. And I think, especially in terms of researchers who would help with the response effort, assessing things, that sort of thing. So there were a lot of—the engineers managed this really well—a lot of invites went out internationally, a lot of engineers came in, invited to come and help, and were amazing. And I think that it's really hard to overstate the value this provided. And I think, generally speaking, the international researchers who came in and collaborated with locals and with the local effort, I went and had a look in 2014, and over half of the publications about this earthquake were co-authored by New Zealanders and international researchers, which is a really unusual thing, I think, in terms of where I was looking.
The second thing that it did was that it really did inspire some local researchers with no prior experience, and in some cases, this was just totally amazing. I'd sort of like to shout out to Raven Cretney and Jay Marlowe in particular, who did extraordinary participatory work with local communities after the earthquakes, and had no prior sort of experience in that field. I think, there was also a little bit of a problem with a lack of awareness, meaning sometimes there was replication of earlier studies, and things like that, because the researchers were not familiar with the field.
And I think the third thing, and I've talked about this before in other contexts, was that it generated this really much wider surge of international research, that kind of exceeded our capacity to manage it. And… and this was not, this is in no way to, kind of, like blame or shame anybody, it's just that, it's just a function of numbers. There were just too many people who were interested for us to cope with. And I think that problem was really particularly from those who were not invited, or who were not particularly interested in being involved in the local effort, or with locals. And so that there were a lot of internationals who would turn up, for example, at the Christchurch Response center, which is where the response was being organized, where Tom and I were based as science liaisons, and so on, where Ken was based as an engineer assessing things, and they would turn up and they would want help to gather data for the benefit of their own careers only, but they wanted, USAR teams or other researchers or whatever to engage with them, to host them, to, and so on, participate in interviews. And I think, perhaps the best example in the early days was the numbers of international geotechnical researchers. By the time we started the second week of the response, the numbers had gone up to over 200 a day. And they were, this pressure was so great that the National Controller, in consultation with the local research community, put a research moratorium in place during the response. And that was actually quite controversial in many quarters, but, from our perspective, certainly from my perspective, I think it was, it was, the right call at the time.
I think the other thing was that this particular surge—there's been work done in the space before—in the volcano crisis context, and also after the tsunami, that makes it fairly clear that there are some real ethical issues that arise just due to this enormous pressure, really, and the competition for data, disaster data. And, and I think the main lessons, I think, that we learned actually followed on exactly from that earlier work, so it wasn't as if it was new stuff, but it was basically that really, to be ethical and impactful research has to be conducted in collaboration with and for the benefit of impacted communities. And when I say communities, I, it's a bit like what Julia was saying, it's all communities, grassroots communities, practitioner and policymaking communities, research communities, all of those involved in a sort of collaborative response. All those communities, they need to be respected and supported, basically. And I think focusing on building capacity and sharing credit by ensuring that findings are published with local collaborators as co-authors is really important. And because, we're very grateful for the amount of time, for the amount of work that was done there.
I think I'm probably getting towards the end of my time, but there's a couple of observations, I think, about the effect that had for us on the local research environment. I think that was one of the questions. And I think, on the one hand, it really did raise awareness of the need to formally include science advice and response and recovery systems and structures. And that did catalyze, for example, the establishment of specialist science advisors. We have two on the panel, Tom and Ken right now, who work closely as the knowledge brokers with particular agencies. And also, it catalyzed a bunch of hazard-specific advisory panels. I think, for me, what was disappointing was that it didn't catalyze a more structured sort of boundary organization/platform arrangement that the UN (United Nations) had suggested would be the best way to go forward, and some other countries have done quite successfully in Southeast Asia in particular. And instead, it kind of almost perversely, to me, uttered in a period of much more organic, less structured national collaborative research networks and initiatives. And most of these were funded by large government research funding initiatives. But I think Tom is particularly well-placed to make some comments about that. So, that's probably, me, my time up, so I'll, yeah, stop at that point. Thanks!
Anna Canny, Natural Hazards Center: Thank you, yeah, Tom, maybe if you want to add anything for that question, but anyone's welcome to.
Tom Wlison: Well, no, I'd really just endorse what Sarah was saying. I think it's been quite transformative in terms of how, at least, I'll stick to my lane of the emergency management sector for New Zealand, but it's been quite a transformative time for informing how we try and provide science advice in that space, and I use the term science as inclusively as possible.
I think, interestingly as well, though, I guess, reflecting on this, it's also locked us in to a few particular pathways, and that's been fascinating as well. We still take quite a hazard-centric approach to some of these questions. For example, we have an earthquake science advisory panel, my hopes and dreams is that we might be able to turn that around and to be more of a, perhaps more cross-disciplinary or more consequence-based approach. You know, it could be something more focused around community, for example, in terms of key advice. But, yeah, it's… I just… I think it's a lovely summary that Sarah's given.
Anna Canny, Natural Hazards Center: Yeah, I agree. Very thorough.
Ken Elwood: I might just, I might just note, that, you know, you can't let a good disaster go to waste. And I say that in the utmost respect for those affected by the disaster. We must learn from these disasters as much as we can, and so they don't happen again. But there's an opportunity window that is there, as researchers when something like this happens. And, I was able to participate in that opportunity. When I arrived in New Zealand, there was an opportunity to apply for a center of research excellence, [which became] QuakeCore. And, we, that's very, very competitive, so even though it might seem quite obvious that there should be a center in earthquake resilience in New Zealand, it wasn't an obvious sell. But when we met the panel in Christchurch and took them to the top of the hotel building and had them look across the city, it was quite obvious of the need for a center of research excellence in earthquake resilience. So, you need to be ready for those opportunities, and, that includes, the research community and leveraging that investment from the national government in research.
Anna Canny, Natural Hazards Center: Yeah, thanks for adding that, too. I think the idea that, you know, knowing how we respond as a research community, new institutions, new initiatives that come out of these, and making sure they're very productive is a really important point to drive home.
With an eye on time, we won't have too much time for this, and I think both you, Ken, and Tom spoke to this a bit in your opening comments, but I do want to take some time to talk about changes to the built environment in terms of resilience and mitigation, as I kind of touched on in the beginning, many, many buildings and homes were destroyed, thousands, as a result of this earthquake, or later demolished, due to the damage. And, as some people are discussing in the chats, there's this idea of the neighborhoods that were bought out and designated as "red zones". I'm just curious if you could talk a little bit, each of you, about some of the major strides that have been made for resilience in the built environment over the last 15 years, strengths, and then also, maybe on the flip side of that, some of the challenges associated with successfully implementing earthquake resilience and mitigation strategies in the wake of an event like this.
Ken Elwood: It was remarkable, the uptake in Christchurch and the rebuild of what we call "low-damage" technologies. And there was, I think, one building in Christchurch that was base-isolated at the time of the earthquake, within just a few years there were 12 buildings. And that's a remarkable, change in such a short period of time.
But there was also, there were no, there was really no guidance at the time as to how to design these low-damage systems, and in fact, only just last year we finally released some guidance on how to design low-damage systems. So it's, again, it's being ready for those opportunities. There's probably quite a bit of variability in terms of the performance of those low-damage systems that were implemented in Christchurch in the immediate aftermath because of the lack of strong guidance at that time. And it takes time to put together such guidance, bringing together the research community and the engineering practice community. And it takes even more time to actually implement these sorts of things into regulatory minimum, like, minimum building code requirements. And we're really only getting to that point now. We see the influence of the Christchurch Earthquake well beyond Christchurch, though, and in fact, in the U.S, the "functional recovery" focus of building code development in the U.S. has been heavily influenced by the experience in Christchurch.
So it, and that's really just unfolding now as well. So it takes a long time for these things to trickle through, particularly to the minimum, the building code level, that is applied across all buildings. So we're still in the midst of that journey of change.
Tom Wlison: I just, again, I'll try and be very brief here. I just totally agree with Ken. I love that mantra of everything takes time, often to the point of acute or extreme frustration for, for everyone working in it, trying to manage risks all the way through to communities, experiencing them and living them day to day.
I think the thing that I would add is, we've seen demonstrably or demonstrable resilience performance from the built environment in Christchurch, where there has been a couple of big earthquakes—or at least nothing of the scale of February, 22, 2011—but we've had the Kaikolda Earthquake in 2016, and a number of aftershocks from the Canterbury Sequence, where we saw the benefit of both the structural engineering performance improvements, and particularly the distributed infrastructure networks, which had been improved substantially. And I think the, retirement of, or retreat of, I think in the end it was about 6,000 residential properties was hugely beneficial there as well, in terms of, obviously, direct losses, but particularly for those communities that were being subjected to compounding effects. I think one of the points I was quite keen to note as well was the, a big shift I think I really recall, and maybe I possibly was a bit youthful at the time, but I thought that the earthquake had such a focusing effect on what does the built environment mean for communities? And it's certainly not to say that engineers weren't thinking about that prior, but I think it had a really focusing effect of the implications of what a building is, and the important part of people's lives, livelihoods, and the communities that they work within. And just how important that functional approach to the built environment was perhaps rather than just, you know, something being survivable, or remaining standing, or whatever. So, I think that was really important.
And one that's a little bit closer to my research expertise was, I think we saw a huge shift from a very hazard-centric approach to our risk assessment to much more of a focus on consequences, and even what those second and third order effects might be to better inform our understanding of risk. And I think particularly in the infrastructure environment was that focus on disruption, or New Zealand often calls it loss of service. And what does that mean for communities? And being able to better understand what that might look like, so that the asset may still be in place, but it's not functional. And so, therefore, it's, you know, that's not what we want from it in terms of performance. And I think that had a… that was quite transformative, and things that we now perhaps take as, you know, for granted in a lot of our planning and considerations, you know, really it came out of that, that very, confronting and difficult, but very rich time after the earthquake.
Anna Canny, Natural Hazards Center: Yeah, thank you both so much. That sort of sets up nicely, and I want to leave a bit of time for audience questions. We don't have much time in the hour, but sets up nicely this question that was most popular from our, audience-submitted questions via Zoom registration, which is just thinking about how we're 15 years out from this earthquake, if a sequence like this or a similar earthquake event happened again this year, how do you think we are better, or… or maybe not better prepared? How would it turn out differently if it happened today? And that's a question for everyone to chime in on.
Julia Becker: Shalll I give it a go to start with? Yeah, I was having a little think about this, and yeah, I was saying to my colleagues before that one of my great professors here, emeritus, John McClure from Victoria University, he would always say to me "If we're really well prepared, and an event happens, there's no need for us to think about the response or the recovery because we'll be sorted. But obviously, every event's different, right? We can definitely learn and apply some of these lessons that we have from events within New Zealand and internationally. But I think we're always going to be hit by, you know, something that's perhaps unexpected, and so really just thinking about building those relationships beforehand, making sure that, you know, we're talking to the right people so that we can respond effectively, during an event. Being a bit flexible about how we kind of manage the event.
Yeah, so if something was going to happen tomorrow, I think, we might be faced with some new but slightly different challenges, but hopefully, yeah, some of the things we've changed are gonna improve our future outcomes. So, for example, some of the building work that Ken was speaking to. If we can sort of improve some of the performance of our older buildings, awesome, that would be great. Yeah, so I guess keep, keeping chipping away at some of those things to try and improve things for future.
Sarah Beaven: I can sort of, I think from my perspective the thing that's been a bit concerning especially based on some of the work my doctoral students have been doing more recently, is that looking into the sort of legislative frameworks that constrain risk management and risk governance decisions in New Zealand, what seems to have happened after the earthquake is that if we had that same earthquake again in Christchurch, in the Christchurch that we have now, then in that situation, we would be fine. But if we had it in Wellington, we might not. And I think, so part of the problem is that all of the sort of legislative changes that happen after the earthquake, many of them tend to focus on the area that's been affected and addressing those issues in that area, and they're often temporary and short-term, and that's been the case, in terms of community-led recovery, for example. One of my students has had a look at that, and that there were some short-term changes that weren't really enacted on the ground because of the sort of persistence of a larger set of norms and constraints.
And the same in liquefaction risk governance over that period of time, that the broader legislative constraints on that haven't really changed. So, I think that, to me, is the most disappointing back, and that's the area where I would like to see—we haven't actually stepped back the way, say, the Indonesian government did after the tsunami, and thought "Okay, we've really got to change the broader, structure so that we have much less siloing and more connecting across, you know, regional platforms, things like that".
Ken Elwood: I'll just say one thing, and, you know, 15 years, sometimes that feels like a long time. I certainly feel like a lot older, but it's really very short. And if you think about the built environment, we design our buildings, for, notionally for 50, but really, they're around for, you know, 100 years or so. So it takes a very long time for changes that we make to actually have profound modification to our built environment, and the risk in our built environment. And so, 15 years is a pretty short time. Fundamentally, I'm not sure I would expect much of a change. As Sarah said, in Christchurch, it's quite a bit different, because everything changed, there was quite a bit of change so quickly because of the replacement of buildings and so on.
But everywhere else in New Zealand, there's still a lot of risk out there. But we're on a path, on a journey that's quite a bit longer than 15 years to get to improved resilience.
Anna Canny, Natural Hazards Center: Thank you so much. Tom, if you want to...
Tom Wlison: No, no, no, I feel like it's all been well covered.
Anna Canny, Natural Hazards Center: Excellent. Okay, we might have a little bit more time at the end, but I do want to get to some of the audience questions. We had a great one from Michael Gottfried, so thank you so much for submitting that who is based in western Washington, mentioned that it's an area with infrequent earthquakes, but also the potential for catastrophic earthquakes. So his question is, "How, you know, maintaining interest in earthquake investment can be challenging, when you have that type of hazard environment, so what are some of your suggestions for raising and sustaining awareness and investment in and around earthquake hazards?"
Tom Wlison: I'd be happy to, lead off. There'll be wonderful suggestions from the other three, but just one… I guess one that's front of mind is never underestimate the power of storytelling. And I think one of the areas that we have had some demonstrable success on has been with Alpine Fault risk preparedness. There's been an amazing collaboration between, practitioners, policy experts, and the research community focused around one of our well-recognized national risks of an Alpine Fault rupture, which would, is estimated to be around about a magnitude 8 event. What that's...and I think what's really hung around that has been having a scenario which has this amazing visualization of the fault rupture and the seismic waves sort of radiating out from Brendan Bradley and his team at UC (Uiversity of Canterbury) that visualization, I think, has been one of the single most effective risk communication things that I can remember in our sector. But what it's coupled with, and I think this is really important, is what are the likely consequences?
And so, rather than it just being, oh, there's XYZ, you know, peak ground acceleration in whatever area, it takes it through in terms of what are the likely impacts in terms of critical infrastructure outage, and goes through time, even as far out as multiple years after the event. And it's, you know, there's huge uncertainties there. But it allows decision makers and communities to better appreciate what that might look like. And it's been quite inspirational at everywhere from government level through to community preparedness. So I think that's one tool that you've got in your toolbox.
I think the, the other, sort of strong reflection, is we must continue to have strong connection with those that are responsible for managing our risks. I think Sarah and Ken have alluded to this already, but the critical importance of the research community to do rigorous research, understand, and really question what some of those key risk management options are, is essential. I'll speak at least for the New Zealand context, where in so many areas we understand the risk pretty well, or at least, I would argue, well enough. What we really struggle with is how to effectively manage that risk, and all of the various competing demands that society has. And so I think that's probably also a really key research agenda that probably deserves more prominence, at least than it has in New Zealand at the moment. Kia ora.
Sarah Beaven: Can I just add, thanks to Lydia for popping the link to the AF8 work, into the chat further up, and also to Jenny for adding the visualization that Tom mentioned there. Another comment with the AF8 thing is that it was practitioner-led, which is unusual in the international literature and also in New Zealand, but so it was a science-practitioner collaboration that was led from the practitioner side, yeah.
Anna Canny, Natural Hazards Center: Sorry, I don't know if anyone else wants to jump in on that question before we move on, but we do kind of have to wrap up on time, but I do want to take just a moment. Tom kind of touched on this, but just to reiterate the question. In closing, I'm wondering if each of you could give one sentence about a key lesson that you hope other communities learn from the Christchurch Earthquake, and that can, you know, be any part of what we talked about today. But if you could briefly give us a lesson.
Ken Elwood: I'll jump in with one, and I think I've said it a few times already, is sort of, you know, be ready for the window of opportunity when an event happens. So, but also be aware of the pendulum swing, that will accompany that, the event. And just be conscious as you see that pendulum swinging, of the effects that it's gonna have down the track. So trying to build some inertia and moderate that swing is, really important to do.
Sarah Beaven: I think my comment would be I guess, to research communities, and it really is remember that it's going to be critical to subordinate your own research interests and career to the needs of the impacted regions and communities. So, and at the end of the day, the benefits for researchers are publications, so collaborate and publish with people in the area. Would be my one comment.
Julia Becker: Oh, shall I jump in next? I'm gonna… I'm gonna talk about something we didn't really talk about, as my key takeaway, because I saw there were a few comments in the chat about, kind of, the importance of communication. And mine is really just to reflect on the fact that prior to, the earthquake sequence occurring, obviously risk perception was low, and people didn't really understand earthquakes, so they were really quite surprised and, I guess, distressed by this earthquake sequence that was ongoing and ended in, didn't end, but it had a very big number of aftershocks throughout it. So it's, yeah, making sure that people understand kind of what they how they, how they might play out, how they might experience in them before the event actually happens, some of that preparedness and that education stuff is really important to do beforehand. And just to also remember that as a sequence evolves, people are going to have different experiences, they're going to be at different stages, so you really need to think about how you change that communication. If you've just been hit by a really massive earthquake, you're probably going to want to be focusing on the welfare aspect. As you move along, you might be thinking about how the aftershocks are playing out, how the services are looking for people, some of the insurance issues, so evolving that communication over time is really important, I think.
Tom Wlison: Just hard to follow those three, wonderful thoughts, but mine's probably quite simple, and it's be useful. I think the, so, it's so easy to get wrapped up in, careers and what we're trying to achieve, but really trying to think around what that utility of our research or activities that we're doing. And I probably followed up with, be purposeful. I think it can be quite easy to, and I'm certainly guilty of this, where, things get hard, or, messy, or complicated, I'm being polite here. Disaster recoveries are awfully challenging. Awfully, awfully challenging. And I think that's where the unique privilege that the research community has of being able to stay the course with some of the key questions and key knowledge gaps that need to be addressed. I really enjoyed Ken's reflections in particular of what that pipeline of, you know, from observation through to how do we implement that into policy and practice, I think it can take a lot of time. So again, just tha, I guess that reiteration of be as useful and be as purposeful as you can.
But I guess that, I imagine this is the final chance to say anything, is just I wanted to say a huge thank you, both to the New Zealand,communities and researchers that have been involved, but also particularly to our international friends. It was touched on, but I really wanted to make this point quite strongly. It was so inspiring to have that thought, knowledge or thought leadership come in and lift our community, and hopefully we've been able to pass that gift forward as well in other small contributions. But I really wanted to acknowledge that huge contribution that was made, particularly by some of those international teams that came in and were very ethical and very purposeful with how they looked to support Christchurch and New Zealand. Kia ora.
Anna Canny, Natural Hazards Center: Well, I'll just take this moment to say thank you so much, for those closing thoughts, and thank you for being here, our wonderful panelists. I've learned so much from this discussion, I hope it's been valuable to everyone who's joined us today. Couple of housekeeping things, just to reiterate, this conversation has been recorded, and so it will be posted on the webpage.
And also sent out to those who registered, so feel free to revisit that. We'll also have a transcript of this conversation posted in the coming days on our website, so we'll be able to refer to that. And I think Lori mentioned this in the chat, but there's been a lovely discussion going on in the chat, lots of great resources and connections being made. We will download a transcript of the chat, too, and post some of those relevant resources or pull, some of those really great questions out and pass them on to our panelists. So thank you so much again to everyone for joining us today. As I mentioned, this is a new series for us. Our next one will focus on the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami in East Japan, and so that… the date for that is set on March 18th. Please subscribe to our webinar updates on our website, and that way you'll get all the information about the great panel for that, and how to register and join us. Hopefully, you'll join us for that.
And I welcome feedback as we continue to refine this series, so please let me know if there's anything you'd like to see in future discussions, but thank you so much for being here.
Ken Elwood: Thank you, Anna. Thank you all.