Tech Comms and the Christchurch Rebuild
August 2014
Imagine, if you will, the complexity of a city – its buildings, its roads, its parks, its people, its manholes.
Manholes? Yup. Did you know, that after the massive earthquakes in Christchurch, many of the manholes in the streets in some areas popped out of the ground, some by many centimetres? As a layperson, you would be forgiven for thinking that manholes are easy – but they’re not. It wasn't just a case of going and jumping on them to push them back in. When a manhole is created, the contractors dig a hole. Then they put in the manhole and backfill the hole with soil – which is sometimes a different type than the soil in the surrounding hole. When the ground liquefies in an earthquake, the varying liquefaction in the different soil types causes all sorts of surprising and annoying results, including manholes that are suddenly driving hazards.
Christchurch and the surrounding region was faced with so many complex problems to solve after the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes. The resulting work has involved numerous experts in a diverse range of fields. It has been the job of the SCIRT (the Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team) Learning Legacy project to document stories like the Manhole Issue in such a way that the lessons are not lost and forgotten. Knowledge gained from the Christchurch City Council, Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority, New Zealand Transport Agency, City Care, Downer, Fletcher Construction, Fulton Hogan, and McConnell Dowell is being collected for future use.
Christchurch’s Cathy Gillespie project-manages the team charged with collating the knowledge, translating it from SME-speak to plain English and disseminating it, and she is one of an interesting and informative line-up of speakers at this year's TechCommNZ conference in Christchurch. Come and hear Cathy explain the challenges of setting up this unique project – she promises a presentation full of fascinating stories of the rebuild of Christchurch.