CTV Building Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

CTV Building - Assignment Example The report produced by the Royal Commission had also officially identified the key players after the disaster. This report aims to evaluate the faults on the part of the key players and stakeholders leading to technical deficiencies in the design of the building. Gerald Shirtcliff was the CTV building’s site manager and he was later found to have faked his qualifications and therefore was not up to the mark. The head of the consultation firm, ARCL, Alan Reay was said to be â€Å"ultimately responsible† even though his designer and engineer David Harding was inexperienced in working with multi-storey buildings. This is because Reay had supervised Harding and therefore he was responsible for relying too much on the incompetent engineer. According to Reay, he thought that Harding being a registered engineer was eligible for the task. In reality Harding lacked the necessary experience and was also inexperienced to use the software Etabs with which the seismic testing of the building was done. Moreover, the Christchurch City Council was blamed for having issued a building permit despite the presence of structural weaknesses. The weaknesses were further deepened after the 2010 Christchurch earthquake and the Christchurch City Council had a very brisk assessment of the building. ... The boulders start breaking and falling on the streets and a chaos strikes. People start running here and there in confusion in order to protect themselves from the falling debris. The road starts to crush and bend as it the ground shakes (Wilson, 2012). These are the live moment experiences of Alex, a witness of the massive, life threatening earth quake that took place in Christchurch, New Zealand on 22nd February 2011. The earth quake had a magnitude of 6.3 units on the Richter scale and was extremely savage and disastrous. Figure 1. Tragic Aftermath. This picture shows the damaged building. The Press. (March 26, 2013). Tragic aftermath [Photograph]. Retrieved from The Canterbury Television building was huge and employed a large number of people including doctors, dentists, counselors, journalists, TV crews and the list goes on. The earthquake killed 115 people including international students enrolled in a language school that was also located inside the building. Search and rescu e teams from various countries such as United Kingdom and Japan flew to New Zealand in order to recover the dead bodies that had been buried deep inside the remains (Bryant, 2013). The CTV building had collapsed completely and there was little hope that anyone could have survived beneath it. Three critical factors caused its collapse, as described in a report released after the earthquake. Firstly, there was a violent horizontal ground shake that took place. Secondly, the columns were brittle and lastly, the layout of the structural walls was asymmetrical (International Business Times, 2012). Figure 2. A rescue worker walks through the rubble in central