Visiting Scientist Information
To those visiting our disaster zone, welcome and we thank you for the valuable assistance that you provide in documenting and understanding what has happened. As you will appreciate, our city is still responding to the emergency so please be sensitive to the limited resources we have available to assist you in this task.
This page is maintained by Bruce Deam on behalf of the NZ Society for Earthquake Engineering. It provides notices for co-ordination and management of visiting Learning From Earthquakes (LFE) teams, so please check here for updates as this is easier for us to manage than email distribution lists.
We have a new database for teams to share information about who is in each team and what they are doing, to help co-ordinate activities. If you haven't received the URL for your personalized access link yet, please enter your name and email address below. Your link will be emailed immediately if your email address (case sensitive) is already in the database, otherwise we need to process it manually.
A manually generated summary of the visiting LFE teams during March 2011 are summarised in the Visiting Team Summary (3 Mar 21:30). This will be updated as plans are updated. Please email these to Bruce Deam. VSNewsletters
The city centre (now within the four avenues; 11 Mar) is only accessible for those assisting with building assessment. (see cordon access) If you are willing and able to help with this task, you will need to email your name and either driver licence or passport number to Bruce Deam at least two days before and attend an induction meeting the evening before you begin.
Please be sensitive when taking photographs as many residents are getting upset by overseas reporters and are unlikely to understand the difference between scientists and reporters.
The hill areas still have rock-fall hazards but residents are being allow back to those areas now (11 Mar). There are cordons in other areas too. If you need advice or assistance, please contact the EOC Science Liaison Team or 027 824 6000 (desk phone - or Kelvin Berryman - 021 582 519, Helen Grant - 021 665 350, or Hannah Brackley - 021 481 581)
The Science Liaison team are compiling a daily report summarising scientific activities in the region. (Information summarised and provided by Jarg Pettinga (liquefaction), Helen Grant (Geotech), Stuart Read (landslide), Erica Seville (Socioeconomic) , Kelvin Berryman and Hannah Brackley) Please email Hannah Brackley if you would like to receive these midday reports by email:
It would be helpful if teams could coordinate with each other wherever possible to avoid a procession of scientists visiting sites, as well as duplicating effort.
IPENZ, NZGS and NZSEE have compiled [ fact sheets that provide an overview of the earthquake, the building safety evaluations and liquefaction.
The New Zealand science and engineering community appreciate your work and would like to archive your records, photographs and links to publications wherever possible. (e.g. the NZSEE Clearinghouse or the Natural Hazards Platform Wiki - see ClearingEstate for access details). Geotagged photographs are also desirable so they can be used for both recovery and future research.
Google have loaded the GeoEye-1 imagery from Thur 24 Feb and Sun 27 Feb (mostly cloud free)
Athol Carr has reformatted some of the strong-motion records for use in his Ruaumoko intergrated time-history anaysis software.
The koordinates.com website lists information about bridge and road closures, building assessments, water supply networks, state highways and road centrelines etc. Consider adding information to it, but please note it is publicly accessible.
A non-exhaustive list of the scientists who visited during September-October 2010 is also available.
Use of Information Disclaimer from the Canterbury Technical Forum