Abstract
Cascading natural hazards are the most complex, difficult to prepare for and often cause the most damage. The Kaikōura Earthquake of 2016 was an example of an earthquake that caused cascading hazards including landslides, tsunami and aftershocks. The most complex earthquake ever recorded, the Kaikōura Earthquake presented an opportunity to provide a potential explanation for the extensive damage seen throughout the upper South Island and lower North Island. This research used the Kaikōura Earthquake to evaluate New Zealand emergency management infrastructure, NCTIR (North Canterbury Transport Infrastructure Recovery) Alliance and identify both strengths and weaknesses of current systems in response to more complex natural disaster situations. Rapid on-set events such as earthquakes are unexpected and difficult to predict which revealed some weaknesses in emergency management including staff and resourcing, logistics, communication, funding, policy and legislation restrictions and Māori and Iwi involvement. Interestingly, the NCTIR Alliance suffered from largely the same problems, where staff and resourcing issues and the lack of industry professionals caused significant issues. The Alliance model is a relatively new development in the construction industry and is rarely used under significant time restraints like that of NCTIR. Working to strict schedules enforced by government put workers in high pressure situations where mistakes were inevitable. NCTIR had the advantage of utilising staff and resources from the recent Christchurch Earthquake 2010/ 2011 rebuild SCIRT (Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team) Alliance, which assisted in the initiation phase of the rebuild. The final aspect of this research is the use of the BRIC resilience framework to assess the inherent resilience of Kaikōura to natural hazards. This is a technique that has not been used in New Zealand before so presents opportunities for further research and comparison. The results of the framework have shown that social and economic sub-indices are the most resilient aspects of the Kaikōura community whilst environmental and especially infrastructural resilience were the least resilient. The results seen here are plausible considering the damage, cost and time taken to restore the community back to business-as-usual.
This research has proven to be very significant in natural hazards literature. Possible explanations for the complexity of the earthquake have been disucssed along with the the extent of the cascading hazards that caused damage as a result. Here, an external evaluation of the emergency management in New Zealand and the NCTIR Alliance has been completed, creating the potential for a comprehensive, accurate review which limits bias. The BRIC resilience framework provides a quantitative evaluation of the resilience of different aspects of the Kaikōura community. An evaluation is likely to be reflective of the strengths and weaknesses of New Zealand natural hazard infrastructure.