As more buildings in Christchurch are tagged for demolition, NZ Herald reporter Paul Harper looks at what the future holds for the city’s planners and how they might be informed by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Conference currently being held in Auckland today.
Update: The conference has also received coverage on TV3’s morning show Firstline, which interviewed Canterbury University’s Assoc Prof Rajesh Dhakal, an attendee at the conference.
An excerpt from the Herald (read the article in full here):
…Dr Andy Buchanan, Professor of Civil and Natural Resource Engineering at Canterbury University, said “lots of buildings in the Christchurch earthquake behaved exactly as expected, but they still ended up buggered”.
“We designed buildings to withstand earthquakes with the expectation that they would be damaged. Unfortunately, many were damaged so badly that they will have to be pulled down,” he told the Science Media Centre.
“Looking to the future, what we have to do now within the research community is to start designing buildings so that no matter how big the earthquake, buildings won’t be damaged. This is the new paradigm. There are ways of doing this. We know how to do it, we just haven’t started doing it yet.”