The Canterbury earthquake of 2011 in New Zealand caused extensive liquefaction damage to residential areas, and became the fourth most costly earthquake for insurers worldwide. In response to that, the Canterbury's Earthquake Commission (EQC) undertook a research program aiming at identifying cost effective and practical ground improvement methods to strengthen the prone to liquefaction residential land of the city. The anti-liquefaction pilot program involves the testing of different ground improvement methods with real houses, followed by cost evaluation and deploying of the ground improvement methods with real customers.
The first phase of the project involves the evaluation of three ground improvement techniques, i.e. the rapid impact compaction, the rammed aggregate pier method and the horizontal soil mixing method, under dynamic loading conditions, simulated either through an earthquake simulator or T-Rex or ground blasting. According to Hugh Cowan, Director of Research at EQC, "there is nothing necessarily new about the applied techniques themselves, but it is the fact that we are adapting them to a residential setting". In the second phase, the field testing results will be evaluated in terms of cost, creating a basis for the EQC to settle land and property claims by estimating the cost of remediating land vulnerable to liquefaction. According to EQC chief executive Ian Simpson, about 30 properties in Kaiapoi and Christchurch are part of the pilot program where methods are being used "under real homes, in real streets, in real neighborhoods".
The EQC-led research program attracts international interest, as it involves the cooperation of many geotechnical engineering consultancies from New Zealand with a universal team of experts from the University of Canterbury, Cornell University, UC Berkeley and University of Texas. As Prof. Kenneth Stokoe II from Univ. of Texas has stated, there is "an enormous amount of good science that can be gathered and applied all around the world".
Learn more about the Ground Improvement Program in the following videos from EQC!
Sources: EQC, stuff.co.nz
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