Vertical Infrastructure

The Canterbury earthquakes demonstrated that building design standards in Aotearoa New Zealand effectively limit the risk of loss-of-life during earthquake events. However, there was significant damage to buildings and significant and lengthy disruption for Canterbury communities. Changes to our building design standards are needed to reduce this damage and disruption, and enable communities to recover rapidly.

We aim to better understand the mechanics and fragility of various building types and identify changes to design codes that will reduce damage and disruption caused by earthquakes.

To do this, we are conducting a broad benchmarking study to clearly define the likely seismic performance of various building types in different parts of Aotearoa New Zealand. Using the insights from the benchmarking study, we are supporting two main research objectives.

Firstly, we are identifying ways to quantify and mitigate the risk of monetary losses due to earthquakes considering different design solutions and building technologies. To achieve this, we are:

• Developing new guidance for assessing and repairing steel structures and reinforced concrete structures damaged by earthquakes.
• Developing tools to account for soil-foundation-structure interaction effects on building performance.
• Identifying effective resilience interventions to mitigate natural hazard impacts to marae.

Secondly, we are helping to develop building design and assessment standards to mitigate losses from future earthquakes, and identifying ways to account for the cascading effects on buildings of earthquakes and tsunami.

Our goal is to make Aotearoa New Zealand more resilient by identifying effective ways of reducing the damage to buildings and disruption caused by future earthquakes.