A new, in-depth report on the response to the major earthquake in Christchurch, NZ is now available. The circumstances and issues noted should be of interest to other countries with seismic risk.

Titled  Review of the Civil Defense Emergency Management Response to the 22 February Christchurch Earthquake, it was produced by Ian McLean Consultancy Services Ltd., under a contract from the Director of Civil Defence and Emergency Management, NZ.

Completed in June 2012 and released to the public on October 4, this 243 report provides a detailed account of the 2011 earthquake event and its impacts, focusing on the response phase. (There is an 8 page Executive Summary in the report.)

The assessment was done by a team of experienced, independent experts: three team members are from N.Z., one from Australia, and one from the U.S. (Disclosure, Claire Rubin is the American member of the team.)

Because I think the issues are important and should be of interest to other countries, I have mounted a new page, named NZ (see top right-hand button on this homepage)  to this blog site to provide additional commentary.

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• NZ quake response review finds failings (bigpondnews.com)
• Chch quake response ‘effective’ – review (nzherald.co.nz)
• Emergency managers recommended around NZ (radionz.co.nz)
• Initial quake response ‘sound’ – report (stuff.co.nz)
• Review faults management of CTV rescue effort (radionz.co.nz)
• Quake response faulted (stuff.co.nz)
• Christchurch quake response faulted (stuff.co.nz)