Christchurch-based blogger gives and insight into life at Demolition Central.
Ever since the demolition wheels started to turn in quake-hit Christchurch, New Zealand, DemolitionNews has been providing regular updates on the progress of the works. But, while the Internet is a fine tool for gathering information from a remote location, there is no substitute for being there yourself to get a grasp of what daily life is like surrounded by devastation and an apparently slow-moving demolition and rebuilding process.
So we were delighted to make contact with Lawrence Roberts, a blogger with Avonsidechch who is based within an area dubbed Demolition Central. Lawrence started by explaining just where Avonside is located:
Avonside is a collection of six streets that make up our little community
• the north end is Red Zoned
• the south end is Green Zoned
• the remainder (around 60%) are Orange Zone (i.e. in the pending pile while the hard geotechnical decisions are sorted).
Of those in the Orange Zone perhaps over half will still have their houses demolished for rebuilding purposes, even if the land turns out to be okay, because they are uneconomic to repair.
“Munted” is a word used in Christchurch to describe something broken by the earthquake. It is as yet an imprecise term as there are degrees of “muntedness” which the word does not convey. A house may be munted because the foundation slab is cracked in a few places, or slopes noticeably from one end to the other, and/or maybe the ground underneath and around the house has moved and sunk a few inches (or feet). Meanwhile the church along the way is munted because it has pretty much fallen down into a big pile of stone and brick rubble. Somewhere along the line we will need to work out a scale to be applied.
For us ordinary citizens of Christchurch a lot is going on that we don’t get to hear about. Much of the demolition arrangements are set up very quietly, no doubt because of the competitive and occasionally combative environment. Some insurance companies are slow to come to the conclusion that a building must come down, and behind every insurance company is one or more anxious reinsurer. This delays decisions.
Because of the scale of the situation – and it continues to grow – demolition co-ordination possibly has one of the greatest influences on who does what and when. Then, with so much happening or under consideration, things can change in less than a minute. A high 4.x or a low 5.x rumbler (aftershock) lasting 20 seconds can determine a building’s fate.
On a smaller scale, job wise, along with the 1,000+ mainly inner city commercial buildings on the demolition list, there is likely to be in the region of 10,000 to 15,000 houses to be demolished in the next two or three years.
Already around 6,000 residential properties have been put into a Residential Red Zone category (total expected to top 10,000). This means the residents must abandon their properties and either the government or the insurance company will arrange for the demolition of the abandoned houses. Insured residents will receive compensation (a complicated, government sponsored, and not always fully compensatory package). A significant number of damaged houses on sound ground will need to be rebuilt, also requiring demolition of the damaged dwelling.
A mindless statistic from this – what do scrap merchants or second hand dealers do with the doors, window frames and bath tubs salvaged from up to 15,000 homes demolished over a period of a few years?
If you are interested in how the NZ government department is handling all this you can find out about demolitions here: If you want a link to lots of photographs of earthquake damage and subsequent deconstruction/demolition try this page
