Garry's Blog

Canterbury Earthquake Royal Commission A short guide to some documents of heritage interest. Volume 4 which deals with unreinforced masonry buildings their strengthening and performance is of the greatest heritage interest. Volume 4: Earthquake-prone buildings  Section 4: Individual unreinforced masonry buildings that caused fatalities  (.docx) Section 5: Unreinforced masonry buildings and their performance in earthquakes  (.docx)  Section 7: Earthquake-prone buildings policy and legislation   (.docx) Appendix 1: Seismic retrofit case studies The focus on the CTV building has meant CCC has got of with relatively little attention to its performance with dealing with sub-standard buildings prior to the earthquakes. It is described as passive. Undoubtedly this passivity contributed to the death toll.  Much of the rest oft the commission's report is highly technical - and  only specialist structural engineers will cope with all the detail. Still a skim through

"Die Erinnerung ist das einzige Paradies , aus welchem wir nicht getrieben werden können."  - The  memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven. Johann Paul Richter otherwise known as Jean Paul, 1812 Do archaeologists create paradises of the past? The authors of Genesis did. While we might not write stories that so explicitly include a descent from a state of grace, we surely do place emphasis the extraordinary and the great from the past, to the exclusion of the mundane.The impression can be left that the past is a land of heroes, greater than the present day. Yet archaeology should be the stuff of the ordinary - for that is a large part of what we find. We should be able to tell an unvarnished version of the past. What are the enemies of that objective? - why ourselves in large part - we want to see what we do as important and illustrative and tend to present it in that light. Who else? - why ourselves again - if we are the descendants of those who'