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Sunday 28 Oct 2012, day 25 of demolition - Cranmer Court building
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Continued from Day 24:
   • Heritage Destruction in Christchurch - Cra...  

Another quick bike ride to get closer shots of the beam I had taken close ups of before (with my 'magic' zoom lens). Video almost not worth posting but this way I can leave a post.

Someone had scrawled a "lives B4 buildings" across a protest sign. Ok, everyone deserves a voice. So I left it, and took a video to illustrate a typical false argument that these uneducated book-burner sheep parrot away at. They don't know what to believe so they choose anything, in this case a sound bite output directly from the propaganda machine. The message makes no sense, is it "buildings are bad, ban all buildings"? Or rip down the strong ones (like this) that killed no one, ignorant of the fact just one modern to-code building killed 115 people? It would make more sense for me to scrawl "lives b4 roads" on the adjacent road sign in an effort to bring down the road toll. Gives them something to believe in, but thick as two planks. (And that's my voice.)

Back to Day 19's "thicker plot", first up The Durham St Methodist Church collapse in a bit more detail, because this is what GB's dungas statement directly refers to - heritage building completely collapsed killing 3 of 6 workers inside who were rescuing an organ. This is really cut from 7 pages to 1 so I can't cover it all.

I looked into this properly on/since the day I took this video. Only then did I realise it was only a block away from Cranmer Courts (a story in itself, and exposes potential inconsistencies in the official record which I want to look into).

This building was unreinforced masonry except for wooden interior and roof structure. The Church was aware it was an earthquake prone building before September, and by the time the men were in it, visible damage was mounting, still holding up, but had become extremely weak on paper (less than 10% of code strength). One theory presented was basically that the ground shot up and fell away, floated the stones, meanwhile the ground was moving sideways, so the stones fell back down with nothing underneath them. I now doubt that scenario (due to its location), but can imagine they were punched about violently, to the same effect. Although the men were in a reasonably safe part of the building, the building basically exploded and rocks went everywhere. There's two ways of looking at this:

One is that it was technically a once in 2500 year event, it can't be reasonable to expect this to happen while you're in there, anyway it could happen to any stone building, in any part of NZ, which means all old stone buildings in the country have to be knocked down immediately to solve the problem.

The other is that the risk of a "6 in the city" was known (yet to explain), reasonably high, but deliberately withheld from the public in an admitted bout of social engineering. Had the men, their employer, the project manager, and even the engineers involved known this (they relied on the same public information and this is clear in the Royal Commission evidence), they could have chosen other options, including safety shielding (which was considered), an even quicker removal plan (eg 2 days were provided to remove internal scaffolding), not going in at all, or to just accept the risk on a personal level and 'say their last goodbyes' just in case. (In other words, the application of the risk factor of 0.5 was technically sound I think, but remained at great odds with reality at the time.)

There were a lot of other bureaucratic problems, mainly relating to heritage issues from the Council (different from GB's point), basically seems it turned into a pissing match. However these were mostly able to be brushed aside, and were probably not all that instrumental in the loss of life.

Also it's important to see this case for what it is, while tragic, only 3 people died, who were at least partly aware of the risks. So I think it's important not to blow this out of context, or demean the heroism of those who were working out of passion and taking a risk to save a life's work, and then turn this into a political issue (I hope I'm not). This was not a public tragedy. It could have been full of churchgoers. The building was sufficiently cordoned from the public, "battering ram" props helped stop it falling outwards onto the street. Even knowing the risk I would have still gone in there (for half an hour or so, much longer I'd want more protection to at least give me a sporting chance).

Also, please correct me if I'm wrong, but these were the only deaths from a stone building. This fact is widely ignored.

My conclusion: Social engineering backfired and contributed materially to the deaths (plus other bureaucracy didn't help). Knocking down buildings doesn't make the problem go away.