As New Zealand worker fights for life, we ask if this high-profile accident was all too predictable.
Due to the time difference, we didn’t learn about the accident – thought to be a fall – that has left a New Zealand demolition worker with life-threatening injuries until this morning. But when the news arrived at Demolition News Towers via our international news feed, it was greeted with the usual mixture of sadness, anger and resignation.
The one emotion missing, however, was surprise.
There has been an air of inevitability surrounding the post-quake clean up since operations began in Christchurch following the 6.3 magnitude 22 February 2010 quake that killed 181 people. Indeed, the sheer scale of the required demolition work and the circumstances surrounding it created an almost perfect storm scenario in which accidents can all too easily occur.
The initial quake itself caused a huge amount of damage – initial estimates put the cost at somewhere in the region of $25 billion – undermining major structures across Christchurch and causing liquefaction across the city’s Eastern suburbs. Since that initial shock, New Zealand has been rocked by almost countless aftershocks that, although dismissed by locals as “shakes and wobbles” have further weakened those structures left standing.
In its haste to put right the damage wrought by Mother Nature, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) was then said to have been hasty in demolishing certain structures and classifying as off-limits a number of others, leaving citizens and businesses unable to reclaim their belongings.
But the overriding issue is one of scale. As anyone that has watched the video guided tour of the Red Zone given by Cera’s head of demolition Warwick Isaacs will know, the sheer magnitude of destruction in Christchurch is almost unimaginable and certainly unmanageable by a relatively small native demolition industry.
Either through a genuine willingness to help or prompted by rather more mercenary motives, New Zealand has become the Klondyke of the global demolition world with contractors from far and wide buzzing around Christchurch like flies around a rotting carcass. And while immigrant demolition contractors from the US, Australia and the UK were unlikely to encounter any form of language barrier that could be blamed for safety shortfalls, each incoming contractor will carry with them their practices and methodology baggage that may or may not tally with local needs and expectations. Furthermore, both these immigrant contractors and those based locally that have been so overwhelmed by the volume of work have almost certainly been forced to employ less-than-experienced labour.
Of course, none of this background is of any consolation to the family, friends and colleagues of the man who is currently fighting for his life in a New Zealand hospital. We hope he makes a full recovery and we pray that the appropriate lessons will be learned.
