Taking your eye off your knitting

"Could [government, central or local] have mitigated [the damage caused by Cyclone] Gabrielle? Lurking behind that question is the abolition of Catchment Boards when they were merged into Regional Councils [by Michael Bloody Bassett] in 1989. We were told at the time that their task to restrain the rivers from flooding was largely over. I wonder if the residents of Esk Valley think that today. Dropping a responsibility down in the bureaucratic hierarchy often results in reducing its ability to do its job....
    "I wonder whether central government has yet learned that its propensity for centralisation does not always work. Many Cantabrians loathed the way they were pushed around or ignored by Wellington [after the Christchurch earthquakes]. Centralisation is a powerful force in New Zealand politics. While there may be a little difference between Labour and National on this dimension, it was National which was in charge dealing with the aftermath of the Canterbury earthquakes....
    "[T]here is a tendency in central government to see itself as much more competent that local government, underestimating local competence and overestimating its own. Additionally, Wellington bureaucrats have a tin ear to local aspirations. We will see whether Labour gets the balance better in 2023 than National did after 2011."

~ Brian Easton getting some things right in his otherwise lacklustre post 'Gabrielle’s Trumpet challenges fiscal stability' [hat tip Point of Order]

Global earthquake animation

 

Required viewing after NZ’s recent experience:

Check out this new SOS dataset of all the earthquakes from 2001 through 2015 from the US NWS Pacific Tsunami Warning Center! You can read about it here: http://sos.noaa.gov/Datasets/dataset.php?id=643

 

 

One thing that strikes me very clearly: New Zealand is on very shaky ground that it shares with many other places, yet we take so much our architectural inspiration from places with ground that is much more stable.

Something to rethink, perhaps …

[Hat tip Stephen Hicks]

Wellington post-quake visit

 

Yesterday I was out and about looking at damaged buildings around central Wellington to help understand why they were damaged. (This is what designers do.)

As you can see, there are three main clusters of damage: on fill at the waterfront and Te Aro flat, and above Waterloo Quay in Thorndon:

 

 

Several things struck me (observations rather falling masonry, fortunately):

• Perhaps the greatest thing to notice is not so much that so many buildings were damaged, but that so few weren’t! Around 60 buildings are on the official list of damaged buildings, and there is talk that maybe four will be demolished. Only four in a city of thousands! Focus on that and you realise what a job those engineers did.
• It’s true however that not all damage has yet been found (not all buildings have their structure as openly exposed as the Courtenay Place/Reading Cinema carparks), nor that all of it is visible from outside. Yesterday, for example, when I walked past the Asteron Centre in Featherston St, it was still considered sound. Overnight however cracks were found in the stairwell, and the building is now officially declared unsafe. The only damage seen from the outside however is a plywood sheet over a windowpane – and much the same can be said of the officially-damaged Deloitte’s building on Brandon St, below, which aside from a few fallen ceiling tiles looks undamaged from the exterior. And as for the pipes and cables under Featherston St, well, that’s another story altogether …
• That said, there was talk about town that the building in Featherston St had suffered in the 2013 Seddon earthquake, and surprise that it was not on the ‘damaged list’ this time.
  And this was a theme with several of the damaged buildings I saw: new cracking evident from the outside (in the precast panels of the Revera building in Mulgrave St for example, seen below) had clearly joined hands with cracks from earlier times that had been cleaned up and painted.

Cracking evident at spandrel/mullion joints on precast panels at the closed Revera Centre in Mulgrave St

• Let’s also celebrate the crews out cleaning up all the debri. This is work they hadn’t programmed, and yet just ten days after the quake the damage to the city is clearly well contained. Glass and tiles fell from tall buildings along The Terrace, for example, but the fast cleanup leaves the streetscape looking as clean as it always has – and much the same can be said of the rest of the city I saw.
  
• For the most part, the effect of the quake (if any) on smaller buildings was barely evident in most parts of town I saw. Those suffering damage were primarily taller buildings. That said however one of the worst damaged buildings, the comparatively new Statistics House (below, behind a severely damaged low-rise building on the disturbed ground around both), is low-rise. The effect of poor ground conditions here at the severely damaged Centreport compound– sitting on fill that has clearly suffered – is undoubtedly a large factor. So the role of all Welllington’s reclaimed land is clearly a factor to bear in mind.

The much-discussed Statistics House, sitting on failed reclaimed land next to a severely damaged low-rise
building on the right. Note the drop in ground level by the lower building’s entrance step.

• The building code requires that “significant” buildings which includes council buildings, defence buildings, archives etc. be given a higher level of seismic performance. Yet both the 2007 Defence and main Archive Building (first picture below), and both Wellington Council and Greater Wellington Regional Council Buildings, were all damaged – just Christchurch’s council building was damaged in the Canterbury quake. There are good reasons for the damage to all of these, but perhaps the damage to these last three especially might suggest that the expertise assumed to reside in these buildings about these very issues may be very much less than many might suppose.

Damaged Defence Building, above left; damaged Archives Building, centre; undamaged private apartment building, right.

Greater Wellington Council and Wellington City Council buildings (above and below) both closed for business.
Not altogether a ringing endorsement of the expertise alleged to lie within.

• Remember, there is no such thing as earthquake-proof. The first responsibility of the structural designer is primarily to maintain the building’s integrity in  quake sufficient to get the people out, resulting in what might be called “controlled damage.” Although the quake happened at midnight rather than midday, and at one-third of the intensity the structures were designed to withstand, this was achieved all across town.
  Damage to secondary elements however, caused by failure of partitions, windows etc. to move with a building’s more ductile structure has sometimes caused significant failure that could, if the damage had occurred at midday, been catastrophic. Falling wall tiles, falling fittings and falling panes of glass from tall buildings for example: several buildings suffered in this way, and all of these would have been deadly to anybody in the street. (While not itself very tall, the new BNZ building on damaged ground at Waterloo Quay, below, exhibits this kind of failure, with internal infill walls cracked and window rubbers and external fittings and finishes popped out or unfastened.) This is not so much an engineering failure as one of the designers of those secondary elements – a warning to all designers to understand a building’s earthquake response, and also a reminder of the risk of potentially dangerous finishes and styles of buildings in a city located on a significant fault line that has itself not yet ruptured.

BNZ Harbour Quays building on damaged reclaimed land beside Waterloo Quay

Statistic House exterior: stiffer secondary structures (wall, glass curtain walling system)
crushed and/or buckled by movement of more ductile structural frame

• This, in other words, is a warning that should be heeded.

[All pics by PC, unless otherwise noted]

to be continued …

.

Can you rely on the govt in a quake?

 

It’s said that it’s in times of disaster that governments come immediately to the fore, with reliable news, information, warnings …

But do they?

The timeline of Kaikoura's 7.8 quake and the blundering government response gives grounds for disbelieving that comforting mantra.

The nation was spared the devastation of five years ago when 185 people were killed in the Christchurch earthquake. But some consider it was more by luck this time than by good planning.
    Here's what happened, minute by minute, after the quake hit early Monday, with details on how officials intend to improve…

Officials pledging improvement do not include Gauleiter Brownlee, who has spent the time since the earthquake defending himself by tarring others.

He has much to defend – which is hard when you don’t listen.

.

Earthquake engineering is harder than you think

 

DESIGNING BUILDINGS THAT respond safely in an earthquake is much harder than you think.  I hear folk who think it’s simple; who wonder why even in a “moderate” quake Wellington’s buildings seem to be falling apart. The thing is that designing to respond properly to every earthquake means designing to respond to every possible earthquake – and there’s no way of knowing what earthquake you are going to get when even The Moderate One comes.

Just remember that the earthquake that proved most disastrous in Christchurch was the one in which the ground did something it wasn’t supposed to do at all, which was move violently up an down. Buildings aren’t designed for that: until then we’d always assumed they are thrown side to side, and designed for that.

So we learned something from that, just as seismic engineers learn something from every earthquake. This is what the best of them keep a suitcase ready beside the bed when they hear a Big One hits somewhere in the world: they want to see what happened, and how, and which design responses worked best this time.

Seismic design is hard. You don’t want a building that’s too strong (because that strength attracts more loading), instead you want it to be ductile. You don’t want a building too closely tied to ground movement; because then it moves with every little jolt. And there is no such thing as a perfectly safe building. Even a perfectly ductile building with total base isolation is going to have problems if a fault line opens up underneath and starts moving – like it did under this house (that’s the driveway up there on the right on the section of land in Kekerengu that shifted over ten metres during the quake, dragging parts of the house with it):

Earthquake engineering is harder than you think. Basically what you’re going is designing to avoid total collapse, to get people out safely, and that’s about all. In other words, to fail safely. So in that respect, the house above succeeded admirably in difficult circumstances.

But it does mean that, once the shaking has stopped, every building that’s been shaken needs to be checked to make sure any failure that has occurred has only been in secondary structures (such as ceilings) and not in the primary structure itself. So do bear in mind this is perfectly normal, and not a failure of designers. Every building remaining standing after a quake is a success, regardless of how damaged it appears.

CONSIDER HOWEVER THE Statistics Building on reclaimed land in Wellington’s downtown, in which a whole floor appears to have dislodged itself and dropped onto the one below:

The Government Statistician Liz MacPherson, asked the obvious question:

How is it that a building that is as new as Stats House, with the [earthquake] code rating it had, could suffer this sort of damage.

The simple answer is that even with all our knowledge, the code is still not any guarantee of success. It’s not a matter of negligence; it’s one about the nature of knowledge. Basically, there is no way to be omniscient about how the ground will move – particularly reclaimed ground, as here, which is always prone to localised softening – so that any code will only reflect what that last generation knew (or thought they knew) about earthquake design. And a lot of earthquake design is about designing that safe mechanism of failure.

So what may have happened here, where the failure is clearly unsafe? First, be aware that all multi-storey buildings since the early eighties have been designed with ‘weak-beams/strong columns.’ This means that in any shake, it’s your beams that fail first – and since these beams are generally tied at each end, your floor will generally sag rather than collapse. In other words, to fail safely. The alternative (designing for strong beams/weak columns) promotes the potentially disastrous alternative of having columns fail first, with the disastrous failure mechanism thereafter of one floor dropping onto another, then another, until a twelve-story building quickly becomes a ten-metre high pile of rubble, as happened (from memory) with Christchurch's Pyne Gould building. (And when you contemplate that designing with strong beams/weak columns was considered “best practice” only a few decades ago, you can see how little even the last generation truly knew about all this.)

So to hazard a guess as to what happened here, it may be that the expected beam weakening was accompanied by some localised ground softening which also weakened the column to which the floor was tied, causing one end of the floor to drop (which is how it seems from photographs). Or it may be as simple as a tie at one end of a beam that failed – with the catastrophic failure you see above.

The only thing about which to be thankful is that it wasn’t a top floor that failed, causing a pancake failure onto floors below – and that the calamity happened at midnight instead of midday, when this would have been an utter tragedy. But seismic engineering is still not an exact science, and unlikely to ever be so.

ONE LAST QUESTION a lot of folk have is the very reasonable one of wondering why there are so many high-rise buildings in an obvious seismic trouble spot that have dangerous panes of glass ready to be dislodged. That’s a very fair question, but not one easily remedied by any code. It is instead one that every designer should be asking themselves.

.

These shaky isles

 

A friend created this map, with data from Geonet NZ, indicating how shaky it’s been the last 48 hours for much of the country.

 

.

John Key has learned nothing from the Christchurch disaster

 

I was struck to read this comment by the Prime Minister in the wake of the Kaikoura quakes:

Key said it was important to show the international community that New Zealand was well equipped to withstand earthquakes and cope with the aftermath.
    "We need to make sure those people … say as terrible as it was, the New Zealanders were brilliant. And that was the experience out of Christchurch."

Frankly, my jaw dropped. That looks as if he’s learned nothing from the experience out of Christchurch. From day one, when brilliant New Zealanders were banned even from rescuing people from the rubble, they have been shut out. From that, this Prime Minister has watched but, evidently, learned nothing

Nothing at all about having locked brilliant New Zealanders, by armed force, out of their own businesses and their central city for years; nothing from the hydra-headed debacle of EQC; nothing at all from how in refusing to tear up their pre-quake plans town planners did their best to shackle the rebuilding that was going on; nothing whatsoever from the lesson never learned that central planning a city actually delivers (and has delivered) the very uncertainty that ‘planning’ was intended to avoid. (The tale of Joplin holds in capsule form the lesson neither learned nor understood by the PM.)

So it looks as if he’s learned nothing at all from the experience out of the Christchurch earthquake how government both central and local has hindered rather than helped the recovery of what was New Zealand’s second-biggest city. So I fear the worst for those seeking to recover from this one.

.

The right place for a capital city?

 

I’ve heard folk this morning questioning the wisdom of having the country’s centre of government sitting just above sea level on a known earthquake fault in an active geological zone.

Frankly, I’ve always though that was a feature rather than a bug.

(To those of you down there not working for government: stay safe.)

.

Everyone okay?

 

.

Another post-disaster disaster: Brownlee’s failure the only thing that keeps building

 

Christchurch Disaster Gerry Brownlee [pic Getty Images]

Christchurch City’s Earthquake Gauleiter Gerry Brownlee has been a bigger disaster for the city than the quake.  Instead of enabling investors and property owners to do their own rebuilding, since Day One he has squatted over them all and stamped down any signs of entrepreneurial breakout. He has simply refused to learn the lesson that cities only grow and flourish because of private energy and investment, and the post-disaster lesson heard from around the world: that public inertia and uncertainty kills private effort and investment – that handing a city over to self-declared experts is the best way to kill it, whereas taking a city off welfare and making it an enterprise zone allows it to rebuild. And fast. (Unlike here.)

No wonder then that, more than five years on, recovery is still a dirty word.

Brownlee’s busybody “plan” for the city was to throw taxpayers’ money into government “anchor projects” in order to suck in private investment. Yesterday’s announcement that “progress” is finally being seen in building his much-delayed new convention centre, progress that will cost the taxpayer around $300 million plus cockups and without any private involvement whatsoever – a pig in the middle of a big empty carpark -- tells you once more how well that strategy is going. As a fellow twitterer sagely observed:

This is a man who could make a pig’s breakfast out of a private drinking party.

A walking disaster.

He should resign, along the the policy he walked in on.

.

Lessons for Christchurch non-recovery from the Kobe earthquake

 

A new paper contrasts the recovery of Kobe, Japan, with the continuing non-recovery of Christchurch. “The article describes well known earthquake recovery initiatives that took part in Japan twenty years ago,” explains the author, Dr Ljubica Mamula-Seadon, Director of urban planning consultancy Seadon Consulting & Research, Auckland, New Zealand. “The results are there for everyone to see. It’s an interesting mix of rampant capitalism, enlightened democracy and traditional reliance on strong community networks.
    “I wrote the article to demonstrate by example what is possible, since it has been pretty impossible to convey the ideas in any other form. As I say at the end of the article, New Zealand is actually much better placed for this kind of partnership, in theory.”

Guest post by Hugh Pavletich

Kobe illustrates the critical importance of local community control for a successful recovery.

Even with the superior performances of the adjoining smaller units of local government of Selwyn and Waimakariri, the national and local authorities have yet to learn the critical importance of restoring local community control in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Years later, the order of the day is still what suits the bureaucrats.

Restoring community control was supposed to have happened following the February 2012 ‘Peoples Protest’ in Christchurch and the local government election late 2013. It never happened.

This important paper, explaining the community-led recovery management following the Kobe, Japan earthquakes of 1995, need to be read and discussed widely:

“Community led opportunity for renewal — Kobe earthquake recovery 1995–2000”
       – by Ljubica Mamula-Seadon

There are hugely important lessons within it for other urban areas from the Kobe and Christchurch earthquake events, with the contrasting recovery managements.

I am strongly of the view that events in Christchurch events have been less of an earthquake disaster, and more of a bureaucratic disaster.

Long-term poor-quality governance and planning from the time of the forced local government amalgamations of 1989, mean the Christchurch events will likely cost in excess of $NZ46 billion, when the costs should have been in the order of $NZ20 billion.

Little wonder that in a Local Government New Zealand/Colmar Brunton poll  taken in 2014 (but which was stalled by LGNZ for twelve months for its own reasons) it was found that only 28% of New Zealanders were able to say they were “satisfied” with the performance of local government. The 2015 Poll results have yet to be released by LGNZ. You may imagine why.

Not surprisingly, local government amalgamations suggested for Wellington, Hawkes Bay and Northland during 2015 were also and overwhelmingly rejected by the public. Unlike the bureaucrasts, they had learnt the lessons of the Christchurch and Auckland amalgamation disasters.

In May last year New Zealand Finance Minister Bill English acknowledged that   … the costs of the man-made disaster had jumped $1.1b in just a year.

To a question about subsidies or incentives to persuade businesses to come to Christchurch English said basic economics was the best way to attract people to the city.

"That means relatively cheaper housing, relatively cheaper business overheads."

In the discussion on Christchurch's competitiveness he acknowledged Government ownership of large chunks of land in the CBD was not helping.

"One of the more useful things the Government can do is carefully but decisively exit its land ownership interests in the CBD because we are an odd sort of owner.
    "It doesn't follow commercial incentives and in my view we've probably kept the land price too high in the CBD and if we got out of it, it would ultimately find the right level a bit quicker."

Nonetheless, central government still remains the dominant influence in the central city.

The other massively negative influence has been the way councils themselves have gone about their business. Selwyn and Waimakariri councils were open for business about the day after the first earthquake and had been  vehicles for growth " but Christchurch city adopted a different attitude that nothing had changed "so nothing did change". … read more via hyperlink above …

In 2012, former Christchurch Labour Central MP Brendon Burns had this to say within a The Press Opinion … Shining a light in the darkness …

… extract …

For this city to best recover from its seismic nightmare, the process of decision- making needs to be inverted to truly empower communities. Such a radical change is very difficult to accept for anyone - of any political persuasion - who happens to be in power.

The most empowered minority in this  context, of course, should have been individual property owners. To date instead, the required response has been tokenistic and destructuve of entrepreneurial initiative. A top-down command and control system may be appropriate in the days immediately after a disaster (though even then folk were held back from effecting rescrues that didn’t otherwise happen) but not in a recovery that will by necessity take years.

It takes even longer when the man-made disaster continues…

---

 

.

Govt’s top-down plan “hangs in the balance”–Treasury

“Maybe stop calling them "anchor projects" if they haven't been built after 
five years, and have obstructed Christchurch recovery more than helped.”
~ Francis McRae

The reality of government’s’ top-down numb fumbling in Christchurch has been measured in a Treasury Report that concludes the Key Government’s Central City Recovery Plan for the city “hangs in the balance” and the governments so-called “anchor projects” that were supposed to, ahem, anchor the whole frickin’ mess are, and I quote, “unachievable.”

Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee has dismissed the report as “utter tripe.” He doesn’t bother to show any working.

He says the findings show the "arrogant bureaucratic attitude" the Wellington-based department has towards Christchurch.

Which is ironic, not to say imbecilic, because the government’s entire plan for the city since Day One of the first earthquake has been arrogant, bureaucratic and dictatorial. The army out on on the streets stopping people entering their own buildings. Government agencies refusing to let land-owners make plans for their own land and buildings. Several layers of government planners—in total defiance of all commercial reality--telling everyone how, when and where things will happen, doing all but prohibit things happening in any other way, and seeking to shut down anyone attempting (and succeeding) doing things in a way or in a place that hasn’t been previously approved by the planners.

An earthquake is one disaster. It’s a major. But the government and bureaucratic disaster of top-down dictatorial ‘planning’ since has been worse all round.  (Just compare how two almost identical cities fared under similar circumstances: ‘The Triumph of Ethics over Practicality: A Tale of Two Cities.’)

The balance in which the plan should be weighed is one in which land-owners, investors and entrepreneurs should have been free to make their own evaluations and back them—which could (and should) have happened from Day Two. Weigh that ‘plan’ first, And then maybe we should get on and deal with the hangings.

UPDATE: Hugh Pavletich comments:

The much touted ‘100-day’ blueprint is now only useful as bog paper. The sooner it is guillotined into strips and deposited in National cabinet minister's loos the better -- so they can feel just a trifle of the pain felt by many in Chch still battling with Southern No-Response, EQC, and daily interactions of CCDU and the soon to be forgotten CERA…
    The Blueprint lunacy was simply an extension of the paintbrush planning fantasies of the local CCC bureaucrats …

Nepali Montessori

Since the Nepal earthquakes, we’ve been asking Montessorian Susan Stephenson how the Nepali Montessori schools are that she helped set up. ( I featured a while back one she had helped set up in Bhutan, if you recall.)  She has now heard news, she says, about two schools where she has worked, including the Shree Mangel Dvip Boarding school for poor children of Tibetan origin: The children are all okay in both, say the reports, but sleeping outside…

... while the damage is great all around the area, all the children, monks and nuns are alive and safe… the damage to the upper floors of the main shrine hall of Tara Abbey is VERY EXTENSIVE and there is MAJOR DESTRUCTION internally to the main hall, the walls and paintings.
The extent of all the damage to the Abbey, School and Monastery won't be know for a while... Electric power was already a problem in Nepal, and now even more than ever communication is difficult and will take time.
    We will keep you informed with updates and status reports here and on the website and let you know what kind of help is needed.

Here is a site recommended by Susan to help: http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/…

And the results of Christchurch’s four-year scientific experiment are …

The Press, Christchurch’s newspaper, says investors are losing confidence in Christchurch.

Is it any bloody wonder?

For four years now your government has been carrying out a multi-year scientific experiment in central planning. And outside their centrally-planned “core,” the city is thriving. Inside, not so much. Indeed, not at all. Investors and everyone else don’t want anything to do with anything there.

Inside the former central area, central government, Christchurch Council and Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority ( CERA ) bureaucrats foolishly locked it all down for over 2 years, before putting on a further head lock with a top-down plan delivering only uncertainty and unrealism. What the earthquake couldn’t do, they did themselves, “with blissfully ignorant and romantic planning, divorced from reality, deliberately forcing unaffordable and unsustainable new rentals.”¹

Between lock-outs, throw-outs and the associated uncertainties of a centrally-planned fantasy, business owners and would-be investors just can’t be bothered trying anymore.  Now, says the Press, the 100-day blueprint was 935 days ago…

To stand in central Christchurch, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were in a city which had lost its soul. Of course, what we all learned in Christchurch’s magnificent response to its tragedy was that the soul of a city lay in its people. But relatively few people come to the middle of town any more. They won’t until normal human everyday activity returns in force – and this is not wholly the sort of activity that is provided by a convention centre or a stadium. The suspicion is growing that the sort of Christchurch that we all want cannot be legislated for by Cera or its central city blueprint. The privately-funded labour of love that has returned the Isaac Theatre Royal to us in this past year has done more for central city vibrancy, so far, than has come out of the blueprint.

There are several puzzling things in all this.

The first is analysts like ASB’s Nick Tuffley who sees “no clear reason” why confidence in the region should have dropped so much, and Wealth general manager Jonathan Beale who says the result was "a big surprise." The only puzzling thing is that these analysts are puzzled. They should check their premises about where and how wealth is generated.

The second is the central planners, who after four years of Fortress Christchurch refuse to concede they are the problem, not the solution, insisting instead on carrying out  a replay of the scientific experiment of Joplin and Tuscaloosa – or of East and West Berlin.

The third is your central government, who watch all this happening only to continue ordering up more of the same.

And the fourth is you folk in Christchurch who, despite living with the results every day, and suffering all the health and economic problems because of it, continue to vote for and support your destroyers.

So who are the really stupid ones?

A question for Gauleiter Brownlee

News just in from a NOT PC roving correspondent that Gerry Brownlee has ordered up 100 double-cab utes “for Christchurch earthquake recovery.”

New, not second-hand.

Double-cabs, not even your average cheap-jack big-tray ute.

Perhaps because only100 really  big utes can fill up the carparks of Gauleiter Brownlee’s failing "frame"?

The mind boggles.

"I've been wondering why it's taking twice as long to build a house now than it used to”

Why do we take these things for granted? 

Why have New Zealanders taken it lying down?

John is 78 years old. He spent most of his working life in the construction industry. He tells me there are still far too many elderly people [in Christchurch] who have not had their damaged houses fixed.
   This is a bloke who can look at how a house is being built and provide a real, educated assessment of the situation.
    "I've been wondering why it's taking twice as long to build a house now than it used to. We used to price a three-bedroom house on a timeframe of 400 to 600 hours. In those days everything was made on the job. We dug out the foundations with shovels, mixed the concrete on site, nailed up the frames and pitched the roof."
    "Now everything comes ready-made. All they do is set up the ready-made frames and fix the ready-made trusses. Everything is prefabricated. Yet despite this, it's taking six months or more to build a house. It is also often taking over 18 months to get to the building consent stage."

More of John’s story here.

More stories about why things take so long here.

So why should we care about Sutton? [updated]

In our office, sexual harassment is marked out of 10. 

There are people who care about Roger Sutton, about Ian Rennie and Gery Brownlee the rest of the big-government crew drawn wriggling into the light by the complaint about Sutton, about the “debate” about sexual harassment it has supposedly begin and the “conversation” about state services procedures it has apparently inspired.

I am not among them. Nor is anyone around my office.

Sutton should be shamed not for what he allegedly did in the privacy of CERA’s Christchurch offices, but for what he and CERA’s officer’s have done to Christchurch.

If Sutton and his motley crew had simply sat on their hands that would have led to fewer complaints. They stuck them instead into everyone else’s business – achieving their apparent goal of all-but ending the business of business in central Christchurch.

Thank goodness then that there are businessmen around like Richard Driver who, while Sutton played games, got on with doing what Christchurch businesses urgently need: building buildings.

EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING OF THE DAY: Early-warning system

Astonishingly, an early-warning system at UC Berkeley was able to give a 10-second alert before the Napa earthquake struck this morning.

That might not sound like much, but that is precisely 10 seconds more warning of destruction than anyone has been able to enjoy before. Even better…

California is working to complete a statewide system, which could be unveiled in the next few years.

Once fully developed, the system could give downtown Los Angeles 40 to 50 seconds of warning that the “Big One” was headed from the San Andreas fault, giving time for elevators to stop at the next floor and open up, firefighters to open up garage doors, high-speed trains to slow down to avoid derailment and surgeons to take the scalpel out of a patient.

It’s not magic.  It can’t look forward in time or anything.

The system works because while earthquakes travel at the speed of sound, sensors that initially detect the shaking near the epicenter of a quake can send a message faster -- at the speed of light -- to warn residents farther away that the quake is coming… “even a few seconds of warning will allow people to seek cover…”

So, if you’re at the epicentre you’re still stuffed. But anywhere further afield, and this could save your life.

Property rights v development?

Guest post by Mark Tammett

Unfashionable I know, in this election period, but I’d like to talk about policy. Specifically, new policies affecting residents of Christchurch – possible precursors to policies in the rest of the country.

I’m talking about the council’s Christchurch Central Development Unit’s new "Liveable City" plan that, according to one objector, treats existing residents as expendable:

This proposal has the worthwhile aim of increasing the number of people living in the central city to between 12,000 and 24,000, but proposes using deeply unfair means… The sole mechanism the Liveable City Plan hopes will fix everything is to remove any obstacles in the way of developers - including those annoying neighbours… The main changes include … an attack on the rights of existing residents by:
- imposing a single taller maximum building height, and steeper set of recession planes…;
- enabling developers to exceed even the newly increased heights, by tightly limiting the matters which can be considered if a developer applies to exceed the limits…; and
- ensuring that affected neighbours cannot hinder proposals which violate the height limits, by specifically blocking neighbours from being consulted….
    [T]he Liveable City Plan also favours developers by dropping any requirement for Urban Design consultation about the appearance of significant redevelopments, and greatly reducing the minimum permitted size of apartments… Clearly, the Liveable City Plan hopes that removing regulations will free "the market" to deliver a range of small and large dwellings built in attractive styles…

The whole thing's a mess, and as a defender of property rights I'm not sure what position I should take on the Christchurch Central Development Unit’s proposed  changes.

On the one hand, property rights are being infringed by an increasingly complex RMA regime which stops you developing your land as you should - often granting a say to third parties who should have nothing to do with it. This is the main reason we have so many empty spaces around the city - it's simply too hard.

To the extent this change removes some of the bureaucratic complexity, and stops third parties who have nothing to do with your property having a say over what you can do on it, then it's restoring property rights and that's a good thing.

On the other hand, the recession plane and shading requirements that affect your neighbours are one of the few aspects of our planning regime that aren't complete BS, as they do protect the property rights of your neighbours.

I’d suggest the best approach, if CCDU actually cared about property rights (which they don’t) and about development (which they claim to) would be to lock the existing rules in this area as a starting point, but then allow more flexibility to negotiate a change to these rules with your neighbours.

For instance if you're a developer who wants to infringe on your neighbour’s recession planes, you may offer a change to your design in some other area that is acceptable to them, or perhaps even a cash payment or easement if they agree to that departure - or a combination of both.

This approach would provide more flexibility and freedom to allow the city to redevelop, whilst still protecting property rights of existing residents.

In fact, I see no reason why this couldn’t happen elsewhere in the country.

After all, property rights when properly defined don’t conflict. The difficulty is finding law that establishes them correctly, if at all.

---

Mark Tammett is a Christchurch civil engineer.

Christchurch: Non-recovery after 3 years

Guest post by Peter Osborne

If the people of Christchurch had been informed at the time that 3 years on from their devastating earthquake their city would have advanced to today’s level of recovery, I am sure they would have rejected outright the plan that was dumped upon them.

We should remember that no one was allowed to begin repair work on their own properties until it had been assessed by a bureaucrat. We should also remember that many business owners had their properties confiscated so that the council could plan the layout, look and feel of the new inner city. Whole blocks were cordoned off on safety grounds and many people were denied the right to retrieve important items and documents.

Soon after the earthquake, the inevitable was gathering wheels. Both governments, national and local, were not about to pass up the chance for a complete takeover. At the time it was sold as a “rescue package.” Only a few recognised the illusion; and worse, many could not envisage anything that differed to the standing plan.

So here we are 3 years on.

We see a Council that is hopelessly in debt. Yet the taxpayer has bankrolled a conveyor belt of money into the so-called recovery.

We see a government trying to entice unemployed people to move to Christchurch using taxpayers’ money, even though there is an accommodation shortage in Christchurch (as no one is allowed to build anything without first going through the permission process).

I wrote an article soon after the earthquake in anticipation of the extreme burden we were all about to inherit, outlining an alternative plan in the hope that people would recognise a power grab when it is happening.

I can only hamg my head at what might have been in Christchurch, in contemplation of what they now have instead.

I suggested that Christchurch be granted a tax free status for 3 years. That the only burden placed on the rest of New Zealand be a burden we took voluntarily as individuals. That all planners and building inspectors were to be bussed out, allowing property owners to do whatever they deemed worth doing to their properties. That removing the minimum wage was also required.

I understand that this plan would never have flown, as it goes against every instinct that encompasses a politician, and most voters. The very real possibility of exposing the drag that government, in its current state, has on our lives is too much to risk. Thus an alternative freedom-based reality will be cut off at every pass.

But it is worth imagining how things might have been otherwise.

After all, there is no incentive like a tax-free incentive to throw in your money and set up shop.

There is nothing so inspiring than to see people building the things they wish to see and live in, when those next door and down the road are free to bring to reality their own inspirations.

The sheer eclectic nature of such spontaneity that can only come from the freedom to live so organically would have taken Christchurch in its own direction. In its truest and most honest direction.

I bring myself back to the reality of today however, and thus I must ponder the future as it is currently directed for Christchurch.

I can only hang my head.