Opinion – Building and infrastructure resilience still a concern

Building and infrastructure resilience still a concern after Wellington experience

Some of the recent quakes were felt strongly in Wellington, but most were centred some distance away and we will for sure be hit by something much bigger and nastier at some stage in the future.

There was what turns out to be some problems with broken glass dropping into the street and one building in Molesworth Street looks to be in imminent danger of collapse.  However, I think it was an older building and was in the process of being renovated and presumably strengthened.  It was unoccupied at the time.  Older buildings are going to continue to be a risk until they are all brought up to standard and on purely practical grounds (cost, technical resources) this is probably a risk we have to accept.

Of much mote concern is the Statistics Department building, located not that far away, where apparently one floor at least has “pancaked” i.e. collapsed onto the floor underneath.  As the Head of Statistics said – thank god it happened during the night and not during working hours otherwise we would have a major tragedy on our hands.

The concern with Statistics is that it is a comparatively new building which presumably was designed and built according to the latest codes etc.  So how come it behaved in the way it did?  This incident raises a whole host of questions, and no doubt there will at some stage be a thorough inquiry into what happened and why.  In particular is it a “one off” or symptomatic of a wider problem?

I think the whole construction sector – overloaded with work, short of human resources and maybe not as strongly regulated inn a practical sense as it should be – is a “pit of snakes”.  Hopefully all of this will be sorted out so that people can live and work with confidence in the infrastructure around them.  I suspect this will be an unfolding story.

Some questions can also be asked about our roading infrastructure after the flooding of yesterday.  Basically Wellington was cut off for the most part of a day by a rain burst that was heavy but no more than I have seen before.  I guess what happened makes the case for the Transmission Gully road although that is some years off yet.  I was out yesterday trying to get to the Kapiti Coast and I think almost all of the trouble spots would have been bypassed by Transmission Gully.  The question is whether anything can or should be done in the short term to deal more effectively with the current trouble spots.

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This is another of Bas Walker’s posts on GrownUps.  Please look out for his articles, containing his Beachside Ponderings.