The New Christchuch

Between the weekends spent traveling and hiking, it's good to remember why I'm here and that it's not, as is may appear, an all-expense paid vacation to New Zealand. I took this weekend to rest and see what I needed to see in Christchurch. What I realized, as I took a step back and let myself enjoy this place, is that I love it. Not in a can't-live-without-it-never-want-to-leave kind of way, but in a protective I-can't-believe-I'm-leaving-before-it's-all-better kind of way. I love it in the way that I want to give the city and hug and tell it that everything is going to be OK. 

But let's be real, the view for my afternoon coffee wasn't half bad.

The city was first hit by the Canterbury Earthquakes in September of 2010 and it really jolted the city, damaging many buildings and surprising everyone with it's location and magnitude. After many smaller aftershocks, the second severe quake came in February 2011. Because many of the buildings had been shaken previously, and thus weakened, the second quake did a lot of damage. They closed the entire central business district for a period of time, evacuating all the residents. I was working on a building today and someone near me asked if there were any signs of forced entry. I looked at him confused, and he said not like criminal forced entry, but that many buildings were broken in to by first responders to make sure no one was passed out inside. I hadn't even thought of this, and imagining it really makes me feel for the residents of this city, and how they must have felt when the quakes first happened. 

The CBD has since reopened and life is coming back to the city, but now is the hard part: The Rebuild. Another colleague explained to me that most of the buildings that are standing today are most likely fine. Simply put, the ones that were going to fall down already did, and the ones that did not are strong enough to survive the next quake, if there is one. Still, there is a massive paranoia among building owners, and in my experience,  most building owners would like to collect the insurance money, tear the building down, and start anew with really solid foundations and a perfectly flat slab ;).

The other day at I was working on a building located right in the center of the city. I had to use a Google Earth view for one of my reports, and although Google Earth is a little outdated, and in the time since the photo was taken even more buildings have been demolished, the amount of empty lots in the heart of the city center really made me think, this city lost a lot of its heart and soul, along with its buildings, in the earthquakes.

So many empty lots..

Stepping away from Google maps, and actually going to the buildings strikes even harder. One of my buildings used to be a beautiful residential tower. In one direction, the residents could see over the tree tops, all the way out to the Southern Alps. And in the other direction - nothing but the port hills. Before the quakes, this building must have been luxurious. The penthouse, now a unit I all but refuse to go in, had a gorgeous chandelier, still hanging, but missing a few pieces. It breaks my heart to see the contrast between what used to be and what is now. And if that doesn't get you, try walking in to a few of the bedrooms and looking at the calendars on the walls, opened to February 2011. The earthquake was on February 22nd, 2011, meaning that they evacuated immediately -- before they could even turn the page to March. Talk about traumatic.

Seen on my site visit

But this city isn't giving up and it's residents aren't (for the most part) going anywhere. This is the new Christchurch. And the people here are embracing it, because, what else are you going to do.

This weekend the sun was shining in Christchurch, so I decided to do what very few people do in this city, walk around. I intended just to walk to the mall for some Christmas shopping and some lunch, but my walk ended up taking a few more turns and giving me a lot more insight in to the city, as well as a good tour of the destruction. 

The first stop on my walk was, as intended, the Re:Start Mall. Probably the best mall in Christchurch, but all the shops are housed in shipping containers. Even the bathroom is in a shipping container! These containers are one of my favorite parts of Christchurch.

The outside of the Re:START Mall. Check out those shipping containers!

They were originally brought in to stabilize facades and hillsides, and though many have been removed, as the hillsides are otherwise stabilized, many still remain and the shipping containers have become their own architectural style. Aside from the container mall, I've seen architecture offices set in the containers, and even a bar made of shipping containers. The ones that are still being used to stabilize the hillsides, are being covered by murals to make them more attractive to the community.

Shipping containers stabilizing the hillside in Sumner

Today on my run, I even saw some that were recently placed in Hagley Park -- I really don't understand these but they will probably be there through the "Christmas in the Park" festival next weekend, and I mean, what's a festival without shipping containers? 

Christmas came early.. and Santa brought more shipping containers.

After shopping at the container mall, I walked over the Cathedral Square.

The site has been left largely the way it was on February 22nd, 2011. The rubble is still there. Semi-permanent steel framing has been built to hold up what is left of the roof, as some of it cantilevers over the piles of rubble that used to hold it up. There is fencing around it and a giraffe (one of many installed around the city to show "Christchurch standing tall") standing proudly in front.The first time I saw the Cathedral in its current state, I thought, why don't they take it down? Of all the other, less iconic buildings that I'm here to assess, why has no one touched this one? As far as I can tell they're not really sure what to do with it, and in its current state its not hurting anyone. It's shocking to see, but provides a clear vision to any passerby of what happened to this city. So for now it stays.

In new-Christchurch fashion, why I so love this city, a few blocks away, past several more empty lots, is the new Cardboard Cathedral.

I remembered seeing a photo of this in the NYT 52 Places to Go in 2014 (Christchurch is #2!), so I went to see it on my walk. It's small and quiet, but serves as an inspiring symbol of the rebuild. It was meant to be temporary, but since it's so symbolic, and they haven't figured out what to do with the original cathedral, they've kept it open. It was even visited by Prince William and Kate this spring! It costs $600/day to maintain so I did my duty, buying a few souvenirs, and then continued on my walk.

I wandered in to a bookstore, looking for books about Christchurch and the quakes. Many of the books on the earthquake are hundreds of pages long, providing far more detail than I want, but I found a small book called "You Know You're from ChCh When...." I sat down to flip through it, and even though I've only been here for six weeks, I could relate so much to this book, Here are a few of the excerpts:

You know you're from ChCh when,

1. Where high vis and hard hats are high fashion.

Not in Christchurch, but here's a picture of me in my high fashion gear :)

2. Where building demolition has become a spectator sport

     Even more so than building demolition, new buildings going up and others getting releveled are getting so much attention. The slab being poured next to my office gets an unreasonable amount of attention from everyone I work with. We also went to a special open house of a company who is releveling a large building in the CBD. It was very well attended, and rightfully so as they were handing out free coffee and muffins. They even asked me if I wanted to have one of their pens. 

3. Where all of your photos have gray wire fencing them. 

If this doesn't scream Christchurch... wire fence, shipping containes, a crane, and a traffic cone

4. Where locals can't even give directions anymore.
     So. Much. Road. Works. and no detours, by the way. Just make a few more turns and hope it works out -- but it probably won't because the next road will be a one way the wrong way, or be closed just for a day, or just not allow you to make a left turn. 

Having appaently qualified as "from ChCh", I walked home feeling a sense of pride in the city I had just walked. It takes a lot for a town to go through a tough time, open a cardboard cathedral, leave their city icon as a partially collapsed structure and constant reminder , and then to write a book joking about all of those things. What good character Christchurch has developed.

They even put these things in the middle of the road to "Green the Rubble"

To close I'll leave you with the answer to a question that I'm asked almost daily from friends and family back home:"How's NZ?!" I know that they're asking how I'm doing over here, but I'm going to answer that question literally. New Zealand's doing pretty well. The sheep seem happy and the latest scandal to hit this country, aside from a chocolate milk shortage, is that someone decided to make mannequins that show their ribs. This morning on the radio news they reported that Hagel stepped down from the Pentagon, and without skipping a beat, followed with "We are being asked to not drink and play sports this summer, due to the large quantity of people who suffered head injuries from cricket bats last summer." Seriously?! Oh, also there is an internationally noted male drought (except in Christchurch). So on a whole, the country is doing well. And my beloved Christchurch seems to be right there with them. I love you Christchurch, and even though I'm leaving in three and a half weeks (but who's counting?), I will definitely be back, and I can't wait to see this city with more people than sheep ;) . 

My favorite giraffe - here for the Rebuild

Getting My Chance

As an engineer, I've always wanted to solve some form of a natural disaster. Ambitious, sure, but don't worry, I realize that I cannot stop all earthquakes, fires, and floods. Instead I have decided to do what I can, design buildings for what us engineers call, "life safety", and do the math to find out why some buildings don't live up to our expectations.

In college, I cold-emailed the dean of the engineering school, who was a civil engineer from New Zealand. I read about his research online- he was working on a project to prevent the next Hurricane Katrina -- cool right? Kindly, the dean emailed me back to tell me that he was not actively researching, but that Judy Mitrani-Reiser could use some help in her lab. And, so I starting working towards my goal. With Judy and her team, I began researching hurricanes, building trends, and damage trends in the state of Florida to help insurance companies access risk more accurately. It was pretty cool.

About a year in to working in Judy's lab, I decided to go abroad to Sydney, Australia, and I fell in love. With a city, with a country, with my friends and my experiences. And to be honest, I left my heart there. Specifically, I left my heart in my concrete class. My concrete class pushed me to my limits on study abroad and taught me a lot about myself.

But let's start at the beginning. On my first day in my concrete class in Sydney, I walked in to a room of 200 civil engineering students (Hopkins classes had 12 students). I was the only student not from Australia. The professor then walked in and told us that 33% of us would fail. I looked around, wondering what I got myself in to, and a nice Australian boy introduced himself to me. This was Dan. 1/3 of "the civils" who made my study abroad experience what it was. The civils introduced me to 24 hour study parties, involving watching an MTV countdown of the most Australian songs ever, a tour of the grocery store so I could see how many kinds of chips they sold in Australia, a trip to swim at an empty beach on a Friday after our 9 am class, and, of course, a lot of studying, because, lets face it, that class was hard.

But another amazing thing happened that morning. There was an earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. Before this, Christchurch was considered a pretty safe place in terms of earthquakes. The fault lines that ran through New Zealand and created all the mountains that we all come to New Zealand to see, avoided Christchurch. They went up the west side of the South Island, but not all the way over here. Right after the professor told us that 33% of us would fail the class, he also told us that as Australian engineers, this morning would change our lives. That the concrete codes would change, the building philosophy would change, and our lives as engineers in this region would be changed. He told us to face reality, that few of us would be engineers in Sydney for our whole lives. That many of us would engineer structures in Hong Kong, the United States, the UAE, and even New Zealand. This really did change everything.

As study abroad ended, I told myself, and the civils, that I would be back. I planned to come home, graduate, and go back to find a job in Sydney. That fall, I took a senior design class at Hopkins, that was taught by an adjust professor from Simpson Gumpertz and Heger. I loved the class and the work that the professors did, so during my winter break, I went to visit their office in DC and shadow my professor for a day. I spent some time at the end of the day talking to people around the office. I had applied to Lehigh at this point, so my professor introduced me to a Lehigh alum, Bob. Bob told me all about this new project that he was trying to work through. A building had differentially settled in Christchurch, NZ after the 2011 earthquakes. There wasn't much precedence at the time for re-leveling a building that had sunk more in one corner than the rest of the building. Bob was working through many repair schemes, that he shared with me. And that was it. I decided that day that SGH was the company for me. I could do work on differentially settled buildings in New Zealand and create new ways to save a city. Done deal. But not so fast...

I got an interview with the Performance department at Thornton Tomasetti. Shortly after the interview, they gave me an offer. Many people in my masters program knew my feelings about Australia, and another student, told me that TT often sends new people to New Zealand to do earthquake repair work -- um hello, dream come true. It could happen to me because it happened to another Lehigh MEng grad who went to work in the New York office of Thornton Tomasetti (Hey Kiki). I told my mom, and she asked when she could book her ticket. Not quite yet.

When I got to TT, I got involved in the Property Loss Consulting group. The PLC group, in a nutshell, works on insurance claims for adjusters, as structural experts. We verify claims and repair schemes, very similar to the work I was doing in my lab at Hopkins. I started talking to the head of the practice in New York, and not long after that, the idea of coming to the TT Christchurch office came up. We just had to see what the demand was in New Zealand, and unfortunately the timing just wasn't right. I was super bummed, but told myself my chance would come.

It took a little over a year of ups and downs, the idea of New Zealand on the table a few times, but never made a reality. Then one night, at 4:30 am I got an email from Kiki (The Lehigh graduate who had been sent from the NY office to New Zealand) She said she had mentioned my name a few times at happy hour, and asked if I would still consider coming to New Zealand. I replied "I could potentially be interested... when?" Less than a week later, the head of the PLC practice popped the question(s), "Do you want to go to New Zealand? And can you leave tomorrow?" Well tomorrow was a little soon, but 6 days later I was on a plane, still in shock, on my way to Christchurch, New Zealand.

Many people were so surprised that I was able to go in just six days, but most of them didn't know that I've been wanting this opportunity since that very first morning in my concrete class. I'm so excited to be here, and in my first week, I've gotten the chance to relevel three different buildings. I'm only here for two months, but I fully intend to make the best of it, and see all that New Zealand has to offer. I'll write here about my experiences, and post photos of my adventures!

Thanks for reading :)