New Zealand Concrete Research Group to offer a new way to repair earthquake-hit buildings

The project spent four years testing and validating retrofit solutions to reinforce buildings with precast floors, which have been extensively used in New Zealand construction since the mid-1980s.

“We’ve focused on, tested, verified, and developed design guidelines for different technologies,” Brooke said.

The research was also supported by funding from the Earthquake Commission (EQC), Building Research Association of New Zealand (BRANZ) and Concrete NZ.

“Prefabricated hollow floors have been recognized as a seismic hazard for many years, and EQC has been keen to support any research that would address this issue,” said EQC’s Chief of Resilience and Research, Dr. Joe Horrocks.

“We hope that it will give engineers and building owners, particularly in the Wellington area, the confidence to start repairing a building rather than tearing it down.

“New Zealand has experienced devastating effects from earthquakes over the past 11 years, but from that shock we have learned a tremendous amount and developed world-leading scientific and engineering solutions,” she continued.

“Many owners may have been putting off investing in repairs, for fear of having to do more repairs later, but now they can be confident that the retrofit will work.”

Brock said precast concrete hollow floors had been a favorite in Aotearoa’s construction since the 1980s, but the country was out of the ordinary.

“The rest of the world hasn’t been very excited about hollow floors, so this is a distinctly New Zealand problem,” Brooke said.

The weakness of the system was revealed in the 1994 Northridge earthquake in North America in which buildings with hollow floors were badly damaged, he said.

Professor Des Paul at the University of Canterbury was concerned about the New Zealand context and spent nearly two decades investigating hollow floors, eventually developing guidelines on their evaluation with Professor Richard Fenwick.

“Unfortunately, they published their findings shortly before the Darfield earthquake and their findings were lost in the chaos of those earthquakes,” Brooke said.

It was only after the damage caused by the Kaikoura earthquake that authorities and researchers urged action.

“It is the culmination of 25 years of research, building on Des Bull’s work and funding from EQC, which will be of great value to earthquake engineers in New Zealand and beyond,” concluded Brooke.

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