New Zealand quake collapse file 'grim reading'

CHRISTCHURCH'S six-storey Canterbury TV building in which 115 people died during an earthquake in February last year should never have been approved.

CHRISTCHURCH'S six-storey Canterbury TV building in which 115 people died during an earthquake in February last year should never have been approved, a royal commission has found.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said the report on the CTV collapse "makes for grim and sobering reading", adding it would be of little comfort to the families and friends of those killed.

The report found the designer of the 1986 building, David Harding, was "working beyond his competence", that his boss Alan Reay placed undue confidence in him, and that the structure did not comply with city by-laws.

Council engineers, the report said, were "under pressure to approve it".

Construction manager Gerald Shirtcliff, 67, who was born in Wellington and lives in Brisbane, is under investigation for using the name of qualified engineer Will Fisher, who had retired, to pursue a lucrative career that was interrupted in 2005 by a conviction for fraud.

Engineers Australia found he had faked his credentials, and so cancelled his membership.

The royal commission said the foreman at the CTV site received insufficient guidance while the building was under construction from Mr Shirtcliff, who remains under investigation by Australian and New Zealand police.

It said the city council should not have given the structure a green compliance sticker - permitting it to continue to be used - following an earlier earthquake, in September 2010.

Changes to the building were ordered by the inspection authorities when, in 1990, problems were identified in the way the floor was linked with the north wall. After the quake in February last year, construction joints were still found to have been inadequate. The CTV building accounted for 62.5 per cent of the 185 deaths in the earthquake.

The report recommends new design requirements for buildings in New Zealand generally to prevent such defects, and to ensure adequate seismic assessment of all structures' likely responses to earthquakes.

The building swiftly collapsed because of weak joints between beams and columns, inadequate steel reinforcing in columns and inadequate links between the floor and north wall, and because the concrete beams had smooth, not roughened, surfaces where they met columns.

Engineer David Coatsworth, who assessed the building after the September 2010 quake, asked to see structural drawings without success.

This investigation of the CTV building disaster concluded the work of the royal commission, which comprises 1100 pages. The government would respond fully and comprehensively by the middle of next year, Mr Key said.

The CTV building housed, besides the TV company, a centre for English teaching - its teachers and students comprised 69 per cent of those who died in the building - a clinic, a non-government organisation and a nursing school. Eight victims were alive for some time in the rubble of the building, but were unable to be rescued.

Christchurch is still in demolition rather than reconstruction mode. The multi-purpose QEII stadium built for the 1974 Commonwealth Games was farewelled on Sunday at a civic ceremony before its final destruction.

A High Court case is getting under way over the agreement of an insurer to pay for the repair of a home for which the owners are seeking instead the replacement cost. They are among the residents of 7860 red-zoned properties the government has ordered to be vacated by April next year.