There was an uneasy sense of recognition as Mike Gillooly, Christchurch’s chief resilience officer, helicoptered over the township of Kaikoura, the epicentre of New Zealand’s latest major earthquake, last November.

Railway tracks had been hauled off their foundations and lay sprawled across roads. Massive landslides entirely covered the main highway, cutting off access to this small seaside settlement on the east of the country’s South Island. Along the coast, the seabed had been pushed up almost two metres, exposing shellfish clinging to previously submerged rocks. Inland, Gillooly could see massive cracks that had appeared along fault lines running through hilly farmland.

Thousands were displaced as emergency services responded to the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck shortly after midnight. The country’s capital, Wellington, which lies almost 100 miles north of Kaikoura near the southernmost point of the North Island, was badly affected.

“It was deja vu, but it was different,” Gillooly says. “No two scenarios are the same.”

If we decide we don’t want to pay for better infrastructure, then we shouldn’t be moaning when the shit hits the fan Tom Wilson

More than five years earlier, on 22 February 2011, Gillooly had been on the fourth floor of the Christchurch civic building at midday when another earthquake struck. It was shallow and directly under the city, with a magnitude of 6.3. It left 185 people dead, devastating both rural communities and the city’s central business district.



“The scale of response was massive,” Gillooly recalls. “And the response transitioned into recovery very quickly.”

Five years on, huge tracts of Christchurch’s suburban land have been deemed unliveable, vast networks of underground infrastructure is still being replaced and the central city is still rebuilding.

A damaged road from the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that hit the South Island’s east coast in 2016. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

But were there also lessons in the response to the 2011 earthquake that could be applied in future seismic events? At three minutes past midnight on 14 November last year, the country – and its capital city – was to find out.

“Yes Wellington, we are undergoing a fairly dense earthquake,” Radio New Zealand presenter Vicki McKay calmly informed her listeners. “This is long and rolling and getting worse … It’s definitely the biggest earthquake we have had in Wellington for some time.”

Buildings were quickly evacuated and people streamed out on to the streets to see smashed glass and panicked onlookers. But other than that, to the naked eye at least, there did not seem to be any serious damage. Wellington, it appeared, had got off lightly.

David Bennett of the Salvation Army headed straight out from his home to start serving tea and coffee to evacuated residents of Lower Hutt, a city just across the bay from Wellington.

“We [were] caring for the immediate needs of people: shelter, food, sanitation,” he recalls. “Those are the first things we look for. We are not always able to provide it ourselves, but we can tap into resources that can.”

In any disaster situation, protocols follow the “four Rs”: reduction, readiness, response and recovery. Reducing a disaster looks at the steps to eliminate long-term risks. Readiness refers to developing a programme to increase a city’s capacity to withstand disasters – for example, by building more resilient infrastructure and making sure the public knows how to stay safe during an event.

The response to the 2016 quake in Wellington was far quicker than it was in Christchurch five years before. Photograph: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

The response to the Wellington earthquake was swift: by the morning, engineers were out assessing buildings for structural issues. There had been no loss of life directly related to the quake but at least 60 buildings were damaged, 10 of them seriously. Before the day was out, the mayor, Justin Lester, informed the public that the city’s central business district would be open for business the following morning.

However, severe weather compounded the problems. The port was closed and the airport experienced delays. All major routes in and out of the city were flooded – a problem which, according to Mike Mendonça, Wellington’s chief resilience officer, was a major wake-up call for the city. He says there is a vast list of projects under way to improve its infrastructure, including investing in major transport projects to increase access, adding: “Now is the time to be having those discussions.”

We were caring for the immediate needs of people: shelter, food, sanitation. Those are the first things we look for David Bennett

Mendonça says it was not clear how Wellington’s buildings performed until a couple of weeks after the earthquake. “There was no particular pattern about what exactly occurred in the city.”

In Christchurch, older masonry buildings had suffered the most. Concrete was shaken free and came crashing on to the streets below; these buildings were responsible for many of the deaths that occurred in 2011.

Last November, Wellington’s mayor Lester was criticised for opening the city’s central business district too quickly. Some buildings were only officially evacuated after people had started going back into them. There were also conflicting engineers’ reports about the level of safety of some buildings.

In the quake’s aftermath, the government released urgent legislation compelling private owners to assess their buildings after seismic events to give them better information about the state of the country’s vulnerable buildings. Mendonça says all owners in Wellington have complied, but it has highlighted the vast stocks of buildings that are at risk of seismic damage.

A man rides past a destroyed church in Christchurch, New Zealand. Photograph: Hannah Johnston/Getty Images

The city has looked to Christchurch to see what changes could be made to better secure them in a future event. Much of the damage to houses was because unsecured brick chimneys crashed through roofs or homes were not secured to their piles. In many cases, houses easily came off their foundations.

Now Mendonça is putting forward a plan for Wellington that could force homeowners to remove chimneys, reinforce piles and install emergency water tanks. “A few a hundred dollars [invested] by homeowners could save them tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars’ heartache,” he says.

Peter Smith, president of the New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering, likens the city’s building stock to an aged car fleet. “You have a great variety of construction of various standards,” he says.

Smith explains that because Wellington was a good distance away from the Kaikoura epicentre, the impact on the capital’s buildings from its long and rolling quake was quite different to the shallow, sharp shocks Christchurch experienced. The buildings that fared badly in Wellington were larger ones that had supposedly been engineered and designed to better withstand seismic shocks and strains. Many of these, however, had been built on soft, reclaimed land.

The Wellington quake also went on for two minutes – longer than most seismic events. This meant the energy shaking these engineered, flexible buildings built up as they wobbled, whereas the energy impacting on more solid, masonry buildings remained the same.

A street is cleaned of silt in Christchurch following the earthquake. Photograph: Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images

“We learned that with this particular earthquake there was a low amount of energy on those supposedly more vulnerable buildings,” Smith says. “It was the engineered buildings that suffered most. However, life went on in most areas – there are some severely affected buildings, but in general there was remarkably little damage.”

Smith adds that while you can go into a laboratory and test a beam and a column under stress, it is impossible to test how a large building might react in different seismic situations. So real events are invaluable to figure out not only how buildings react in different circumstances, but also how protocols and emergency responses will play out.

This information is crucial: both Christchurch and Wellington sit above or very close to large, well-known faults that are overdue for rupture.

According to Tom Wilson, associate professor in hazards and disaster management at Christchurch’s University of Canterbury, there is still a disconnect in people’s expectations of what can happen in a disaster situation. He points to the huge liquefaction in parts of Christchurch that has left an area four times the size of London’s Hyde Park still uninhabitable. The earthquake shook at such a rate that soft earth was effectively turned to bubbling liquid.

“The frightening thing was how shocked many people were, when this was entirely forecastable,” he says.

Volunteers distribute clean water to residents after the Christchurch earthquake. Photograph: Tim Wimborne/Reuters

According to Wilson, the Christchurch earthquake was close to the “maximum credible” event possible, and that while the city responded remarkably well, many families did not have an emergency kit ready when the earthquake struck. Heavily promoted by New Zealand’s civil defence ministry, this includes food and water to last at least three days.

Wilson was, however, impressed with how neighbourhoods came together to support each other. “There has been a lot of research into what makes a resilient community – levels of interconnection, places where people can come together and a common sense of purpose. We saw lots of aspects of that [after the Christchurch earthquake].”

The fact there were no deaths in Wellington should not lead to complacency. While the capital’s mayor admits there are plenty of hard lessons to learn from the earthquake, Wilson says it is concerning that the city was caught off guard so easily. “If, as a society, we decide we don’t want to pay for better infrastructure, then we shouldn’t be moaning when the shit hits the fan.”

Wilson’s hope is that disaster preparation becomes a democratic issue – one where people vote for the party that puts forward the best response and recovery plan. He hopes a regime’s response to events are continually monitored and judged for their effectiveness.



“It’s a question to ask and keep asking: as a nation, what do we want as a minimal response to something like this? Do we want buildings to be survivable or functional after a disaster? Do we want ‘lifelines’ like water and electricity to be working under any circumstances, or are we all right with them being disrupted?”

Gillooly says communities must be sufficiently engaged in the decision-making process to feel a part of the developing story of a recovering city. “Cities are dynamic, organic constructs and there are a lot of moving parts. Implementation is quite tricky, so you have to be deliberate about making sure it’s inclusive and not seen as agencies just doing things for, or to, a community.”

Now, when Gillooly looks out from his window over the centre of Christchurch, he sees a different city to that fateful day in February 2011. “Six years on, the evidence of recovery is there. We know there are still roads to be fixed and underground assets to repair, but I get a sense that physically, Christchurch is recovering very well.”

He admits it might take some time before residents fully accept what the earthquake did to their city. Beyond developing more resilient infrastructure and ensuring a prepared population, the challenge is to develop an ongoing community spirit of rebuilding and recovery. And out of that, Gillooly says, will come the lessons for other cities facing their own disasters.

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