Locations of Casualties in the February 22, 2011 Aftershock
The majority of the deaths were in nonductile concrete frame buildings. Second were in unretrofitted URM buildings. At least one death occurred in a retrofitted URM building. More study of this with Tom Kirsch, our epidemiologist from Johns Hopkins is recommended. Figure 1. Learning from Earthquakes: First person reports
Observations from the EERI Team
Observations from the EERI Team
First, of course, it is the normal process that the Search and Rescue (SAR) folks have to rescue people who are trapped and then do the hard job of finding and recovering those who perished. Second, the City with volunteer engineers do level 1 (exterior) inspections for tagging and then come back for level 2 […]
Observations from the EERI Team
It was the last day we will be doing assessments which has been rewarding work. There is still plenty to do but the reconnaissance mission needs to be accomplished as well. The NZ engineers are a wonderful group of people doing a great job of getting the city back on its feet while maintaining the […]
Observations from the EERI Public Health Team
We are the last two EERI team members to arrive in New Zealand. The Hopkins crew (Dr. Tom Kirsch and I) arrived in New Zealand yesterday afternoon. Shortly after arriving, we had our first international team meeting at the Chateau on the Park Hotel, just up the street from where we are staying. The meeting […]
Observations from the EERI Team
During the afternoon, we revisited a large heritage stone masonry building showing signs of unusual differential settlement, noted by the EERI team on earlier inspections. The large 1930’s L shaped building showed demonstrable settlement, tilting and liquefaction ejecta around its exterior. Maximum relative settlement was estimated at ~.2m to ground elevation. In the 1990’s the […]
Observations from the EERI Team
Now their job is huge and they are planning for both near term business survival and long term revitalization. Short-term, about $10 million (NZ) to the business community after the September earthquake and will provide about $200 million (NZ) after the February event. These funds include government support of $500 per employee per week for […]
Observations from the EERI Team
The day started in the Geotechnical Coordination meeting where assessment teams provided updates on specific areas they were tasked to map. The significant coordination of this effort became very evident as these areas had buildings needing both geotechnical (slope stability) and structural clearance to allow re-occupancy. Many of the building were red-tagged based on initial […]
Observations of Retaining Walls from the EERI Team
Retaining walls in residential areas generally ranged from 1 to 4 meters high. Wall types observed included: gravity rock and masonry walls, gabion walls, masonry walls with ground anchors, concrete crib walls, timber crib walls, and timber pile walls. Example photos are shown in Figures 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Wall performance ranged […]
Observations from the EERI Team
The day started with rain which makes taking good photos difficult and makes everything a little bit harder. We started off the day looking specifically at partially or fully retrofitted unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings. Here in Christchurch there are a large number of URMs and a number of these have received some degree of retrofitting. […]