The devastating 2011 earthquake in Christchurch took hundreds of lives, felled dozens of buildings and wrecked countless homes.
In the years since, the city has been slowly getting back on its feet—and coming out stronger for it. Mayor Lianne Dalziel is working on making sure that the city’s services are “resilient” enough to face whatever the future brings.
“I realised that I needed to know a lot more about the opportunities that would arise from the disaster, in order to help us recover and be better than we ever were,” Dalziel tells GovInsider. “The reason I use the word resilience is not just the bounce back, but it’s this capacity to adapt to and thrive in a new environment.”
[...]
The city is using a technique called building information management to monitor older buildings. This automatically provides information on the building’s strength, which means that engineers will not need to enter them after earthquakes to check if they are safe. “The system will know itself if there are any weak points or if there’s any damage,” she says. “We’re gonna see far less business interruption with these.”
[...]