Railway Interchange 2019

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Railway Resilience - Experience from the Kaikoura Earthquake (Room Auditorium)

23 Sep 19
8:00 AM - 8:30 AM

Tracks: AREMA Technical Sessions By Date- Engineering Services, AREMA Technical Sessions By Functional Group- Engineering Services, Technical Sessions By Day- Monday

The November 2016 Kaikoura Earthquake was the largest disaster to ever strike New Zealand’s railway in terms of amount of damage. Large parts of the Main North Line (MNL) Railway were engulfed in huge slips or thrown into the sea. Bridges were destroyed and tunnels broken. The damage to the rail and State Highways disconnected New Zealand’s transport system. The subsequent response and rebuild has challenged not just KiwiRail but New Zealand’s construction industry overall. It has resulted in the biggest rail project in the South Island of New Zealand since the Second World War. This paper and presentation will cover some steps that KiwiRail have taken to manage risks on the MNL (such as risk rating all slopes on this line pre earthquake), the tools it was able to bring to bear to effectively response to the event (utilizing experience from other incidents and emergency response events, specialist personal, specific condition rating systems, mobile IT platforms and GIS based collation of damage data) and the input it has had as part of the North Canterbury Transport Infrastructure Recovery (NCTIR) alliance for looking to achieve resilient outcomes (undertaking resilience studies of the affected area, planning of future joint response, classifying robustness of new infrastructure). The paper will also outline some of the internationally award winning works that have been undertaken on the railway to achieve reopening the line in only 10 months after the earthquake, despite been hit by several tropical cyclones and subsequent resilience works for its future. *Missed this Session or want to view it again? Stop by the VirtualAREMA kiosk located in the Registration area to purchase this product today!