John Scarry Engineering - Canterbury Earthquakes Royal ...

The major bridge whose seismic analysis and design did not make sense to the
owner’s reviewer, until it was pointed out that the analysis defied all common
sense, and instead of the bridge deck acting as a rigid diaphragm in the plane of the
deck, it was wobbling round ‘like a blob of jelly.’ Even when fully explained to
them, the designer and his superiors could not understand this absolutely
fundamental deficiency.
The large concrete and steel bearing plates for large ground anchors that formed a
very basic structural system, yet two engineers could not analyse, design or detail
them properly.
The Australian supermarket building designed by a NZ firm that has failed due to
eccentric steel cleat joint failure, a design detail that only I ever seemed to think
about, until I got Charles Clifton interested.
A similar roof failure in Whangarei.
The Pepperwood Mews apartment complex in Waitakere City. The thirty two unit
complex constructed from reinforced concrete is not only a leaking, sodden mess,
it is so structurally unsound, it is a ‘wrecking ball’ job. It was designed in 2005.
The 4m high concrete retaining wall for a motorway that had an opening joint that
would have ripped open as ‘detailed.’ Leaving aside the lack of any proper joint
design, the ‘not to scale’ drawing hid the fact that the reinforcing would have been
poking out of the concrete at the front and bottom of the wall/foundation joint if
the hooks had been properly developed from the critical sections.
The multi-storey apartment building in Auckland, designed circa 2005, where the
following defect was only found because the building as a whole was a ‘leaker,’
including leaks through cracks in an external structural shear wall. This structural
wall was designed and constructed as an assemblage of precast panels, acting
compositely with heavily reinforced and confined end columns. Heavy horizontal
reinforcing projected, with hooks on the end, from the ends of the precast panels,
and had to be embedded in the end columns, something that could not actually be
done because of the very heavy column reinforcing. How did the contractor fit the
panels in place and complete the wall? He cut most of the projecting starter bars
off, of course. This may have ended up as a ‘site shocker,’ but that was the
inevitable consequence of the initial design deficiencies.
149. Failed or illegal ‘buildings of the rebuild,’ covered in Appendices B, R & S of my
submission on GEN.CERC.0003.
150. The failed dance floor from the ‘rebuild.’ (Appendix 13).
151. The CTV Building, the Grand Chancellor and the Forsyth Barr Building.
ENG.SCA.0002.RED.26
152. All of the other multi-storey Christchurch buildings designed and built in the 1980’s and
later that have been demolished since the earthquakes. These displayed all sorts of
potentially catastrophic failure modes which were not supposed to have occurred. If the
earthquake of 22 February 2011 had been less intense, but had gone on for a minute or
more, many of these buildings would have suffered significant collapse (these buildings
have not been covered adequately by the Royal Commission – it is a miracle that some
of them stayed standing).
153. The 28 storey Majestic Centre in Wellington, dating from 1991 (Appendix
of my submission on GEN.CERC.0003). Essentially an earthquake prone building.
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