The CTV Building Disaster - Assignment Example

? The Case Study and Analysis of CTV Building Disaster I.D. of the The Case Study and Analysis of CTV Building Disaster Executive Summary The CTV Building disaster case study deserves a cross disciplinary treatment. Yet, the key focus should remain on the engineering aspects of the building and its collapse. These engineering aspects, however, must be discussed in the light of management and organisational studies so that productive implications can be developed for real estate stakeholders that belong from non-engineering backgrounds as well. The analysis of CTV Building can be divided into four main parts. Firstly, technology management issues must be identified and discussed. Secondly, the situation prior to the incident must be discussed. Thirdly, the events that occurred during the collapse of the building should be elaborated. In this context, lack of a predetermined evacuation process deserves special mention. Fourthly and finally, the aftermath of the incident should be analysed. In recommending solutions to the earthquake resistant building design issues as witnessed in this case study, it is considered an imperative to advocate for modernising the building code and construction methods. Moreover, supervisory committees consisting of engineering professionals must be created that can consistently monitor the cityscape on the basis of practical professional knowledge. This kind of overseer committees can provide more authentic technical evaluations in the context of commercial building maintenance and management. Table of Contents 1. Introduction 4 2. Analytical discussion 4 2a. Issues in technology management 6 2b. Issues before the disaster 7 2c. Issues during the collapse 7 2d. CTV Building disaster aftermath 8 3. Summary and concluding remarks 8 4. Recommendations 9 Reference List 11 Appendix 13 1. Introduction The CTV Building disaster of February 2011 has become a landmark incident in the world of engineering and construction sciences. CTV Building disaster received much of the limelight because on the day this building collapsed due to an earthquake, other buildings in the vicinity remained far less damaged than it. The earthquake that hit Christchurch on 22nd February 2011 left scars of destruction all over the city but that did not reach the unprecedented disaster that took place at the CTV Building. According to MacRae and Dhakal (2011, p. 5), some buildings had suffered “partial collapse” (e.g. PGC Building) or “total collapse” (e.g. CTV Building). Several people died and things went wrong especially in the CTV building, where over a hundred persons died. However, most of the other buildings across Christchurch withstood the shocks of the February earthquake. Buildings such as the Forsyth Barr building lost only staircases and noticeable distortion of concrete structures could be noticed mainly at the basement or ground floor areas. 2. Analytical discussion Although this paper is aimed at exploring the management specific issues of CTV Building disaster, technology related problems and contextual analyses of engineering issues cannot be avoided. In fact, technology management itself can be regarded as an integrated part of the whole commercial building management task which is a continuous and active process in itself. Christchurch is situated in an unsafe zone and a powerful earthquake had already hit the CTV Building back in September 2010. A very important note in this milieu has been explicitly mentioned by Isaac Davison from The New Zealand Herald: “The Royal Commission also found that after the first major quake in September 2010 the CTV building was "green-stickered" by a rapid assessment team and later by three council building officials, none of whom was an engineer.” (Davison 2012) In this observation, Davison has mentioned the Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission’s final report regarding the disaster (see Final Report: Roles and Responsibilities 2012). This commission had been delegated the task to investigate the issues that led to the CTV Building disaster in 2011 even though the structure could have been marked as unsafe much earlier during the earthquake of 2010. There have been several key role players in the context of this incident. The main role player was the chief designer of the building, since investigations reveal that the building collapsed due to deficiencies in design. Next, the two major role players are the owners of the building and the municipal authorities who passed the building’s original plan in late 1980s. Then the main supervising engineer of the construction process played a deplorable role by not rectifying the design loopholes. The tenants also behaved irresponsibly by not examining the building design and employees who occupied the construction relied excessively on the owners and tenants of the building. As the building went down, rescue and safety engineers played a crucial role. Furthermore, a strong earthquake had hit the building back in 2010. Then, the “assessment team” (Davison 2012) appointed by the municipality to inspect damages could not play its desired role; it completely failed to deliver an early warning regarding the condition of the building. The fire department and the disaster management department of New Zealand government were other key role players that had not taken any proactive steps to judge the building’s internal safety conditions before it actually came down on 22nd February 2011. Certain major role players were critical stakeholders too. Role players such as the owners, chief designer, and supervising engineer lost considerable reputation due to this incident. Moreover, both the Christchurch municipality and Government of New Zealand lost great deal of credibility. The occupants who died in the incident were another stakeholder because their very lives depended on the building’s safety arrangements. Media has been another key stakeholder since it had the responsibility to communicate the events related to the CTV Building disaster. Seismologists, engineers, scientists, and technologists are another category of stakeholders since they must learn from the incident and create techniques that can help in avoiding similar incidents in the future. 2a. Issues in technology management Expert technologists Kam, Pampanin, and Elwood, K. (2011, p. 263) have made the following observations regarding the construction design of CTV Building: “The 300mm thick RC core walls on the Northern side of the building, measuring 4.8 m x 11.5 m long, were generally well reinforced with ductile detailing typical of 1980s construction. However, the RC core walls had limited connections to the floor diaphragm of the building, with approximately 11.5 m length of floor-slab (minus some void area due to lift penetration).” Clearly, these observations were not made by inspecting the disaster site. If authorities had been a little more careful, the defects in this basic planning of the building could have been diagnosed long ago during the 1990s. From the perspective of building management, this kind of fatal negligence on the part of the Christchurch municipal authorities while approving CTV Building’s construction plan is a serious operational mistake. 2b. Issues before the disaster Tracing the issues as observed in the context of managing technology, it appears that there were serious problems that existed inside the planning authorities and the decision makers of the Christchurch Business District itself. Even if there were faults on the part of the building contractors, the municipal authorities have been delegated the responsibility to check proposed building plans and designs. However, right from the late 1980s, there was a lax attitude on the part of the examining bodies that left the technological design loopholes and faults undetected. Consequently, the authorities failed to diagnose the looming danger even during the powerful September 2010 earthquake. 2c. Issues during the collapse Purser and Bensilum (2001) states that psychological factors are of paramount importance in the situations that call for crowd management. And during an emergency, crowd management becomes more difficult due to panic and anxiety. Be the situation be flooding, fire safety, or building collapse, occupants in a closed environment would naturally panic. Now in CTV building, there was no dependable emergency management. There were no usable emergency doorways, lifts, fire extinguishing systems equipped with advanced thermostats, etc. Also, a fleet of emergency staff could be maintained by the management of the commercial building. But when the building started crippling, no specialist staffs were present inside the premises that could facilitate an emergency evacuation process. 2d. CTV Building disaster aftermath Immediately after the disaster, several persons might have been surviving in the debris of the building. Had there been safety managers inside the premises, there could be some minimal scope for rapid rescue. Moreover, if the building owners had kept a plan for rapid evacuation beforehand, the rescue workers could be given some critical prior information and training to handle the immediate aftermath of the building collapse. But the municipal corporation of the city did not have any contemporary design of CTV Building and no proactive evacuation plan could be found out after the building collapsed. 3. Summary and concluding remarks While summarising the various events in the context of CTV Building disaster, a researcher must take note of the fact that there were numerous problems that surfaced from time to time before and during the mishap. Before the disaster, a defective building plan had been put to use. During the disaster, occupants could not find out a way of rapid evacuation. There were no specialist staffs that could trigger off a rapid evacuation process during the emergency. And after the building finally collapsed, rescue workers were found caught unprepared when they saw that a major fire had already broken out at the site of disaster. Such a stance in modern commercial disaster management is unexplainable since a collapsing commercial building is almost always likely to catch fire. In accordance with modern engineering paradigm, “available ductility of the structural system” (Goel et al. 2010, p. 115) is critical in designing earthquake resistant buildings. But CTV Building design was based on older construction code and no attempt of structural modernisation had been made. Further according to scholars like Jaiswal, Wald, and Porter (2010), issues like stock market performance, insurance and actuarial factors combined with post disaster political repercussion may give rise to a confused state of disaster management. Without a sensible disaster planning and related monitoring authority, no building can be regarded as safe and properly overseen. In the example of World Trade Centre, it has already been witnessed that in the absence of a feasible and fast evacuation process plan, no building can be safe even when it has its own system of surveillance. Evacuation plan along with comprehensive disaster management programme is mandatory to assure safety of a building optimally (Johnson 2005). 4. Recommendations Delegating roles and responsibilities to deserving or accountable project managers is extremely important for the managerial purposes as related to industrial activities like New Zealand’s municipal level building supervision (Millar and Theunissen 2008). In the concluding portions of the Final Report: Roles and Responsibilities (2012), the Commission has suggested several measures to be taken in the context of reengineering the urban landscape keeping in mind different safety concerns. This can be achieved collaboratively, where researchers, cross-disciplinary scholars, real estate managers, municipal decision-makers, and construction engineers will come together in an organised context of holistic safety engineering and disaster management. Although not exhaustive, yet a tentative list of recommendations is being furnished in furtherance with the implications of the Royal Commission’s recommendations (see Appendix). Reference List Davison, I. (2012). CTV Building Errors Laid Bare in Report. Retrieved on 13th August from http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10853110 Final Report: Roles and Responsibilities (2012). Wellington: Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission and Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment. Goel, S. C., Liao, W. C., Reza Bayat, M., and Chao, S. H. (2010). Performance?based plastic design (PBPD) method for earthquake?resistant structures: an overview. The structural design of tall and special buildings, 19 (1?2), 115-137. Jaiswal, K., Wald, D. and Porter, K. (2010). A global building inventory for earthquake loss estimation and risk management. Earthquake Spectra, 26, 731-748 Johnson, C.W. (2005). Lessons from the evacuation of the world trade centre, 9/11 2001 for the development of computer-based simulations. Cognition, Technology and Work, 7, 214–240 Kam, W., Pampanin, S., and Elwood, K. (2011). Seismic performance of reinforced concrete buildings in the 22 February Christchurch (Lyttelton) earthquake. Bulletin of the New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering, 44, (4), 239-278 MacRae, G. A., and Dhakal, R. P. (2011). Lessons from the February 2011 M6.3 Christchurch earthquake. In: 6th International Conference on Seismology and Earthquake Engineering. Teheran, Iran, December 2011. Tehran: IIEES Millar, S. and Theunissen, C.A. (2008). Managing Organisations in New Zealand. Auckland: Pearson Purser, D.A. and Bensilum, M. (2001). Quantification of behaviour for engineering design standards and escape time calculations. Safety Science, 38, 157–182 Sime, J.D. (1983). Affiliative behaviour during escape to building exits. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 3, 21–41 Appendix Tentative recommendations: 1. As early as the 1980s, scholars like Sime (1983) combined environmental factors with the psychological ones to understand engineering management of crowded buildings. The approach must be revisited and maintained while devising organisational disaster management programmes for buildings in the future. 2. The plan and structural information of every building must be maintained by the municipal authorities in close collaboration with disaster management teams. 3. After the CTV Building disaster, people of New Zealand saw a dirty game of transferring responsibilities at variable degrees of accountabilities. For example, owners of the building did not want to take even the moral responsibility of the disaster. Government must act upon irresponsible authorities to enforce fair managerial practices in the real estate industry. 4. A professional construction monitoring and inspection committee must be maintained by every municipal organisation. Engineering professionals in such committees must be given necessary powers to combat both political and industrial pressures. 5. Only reinforced concrete does not guarantee against damage due to earthquake. Example of CTV Building disaster has shown this. Now time is to revise design paradigms and serious reflection must be started on how more flexible designs and ductile materials can be inducted to the civil engineering research and development sector. Read More