Engineer builds on city experience
Research making structures safer during earthquakes
Astructural engineer who got valuable experience with Whanganui’s old buildings will return to the city this year to strengthen his heritage Johnstone & Co building.
During the past 10 years he has also documented the effect of earthquakes on Christchurch buildings, written a book on the subject and completed his PhD degree.
Ukrainian-born Dmytro Dizhur became interested in the way buildings work while he was labouring on construction sites to pay for his university study.
He studied buildings at Auckland University and finished a PhD in 2012.
His subject was how to strengthen the old masonry buildings that he likes. During years of study he was part of a team of researchers who came to Whanganui.
“Whanganui has a lot of brick buildings around and quite a passionate community about their brick buildings,” Dizhur said.
“It has one of the highest concentrations of heritage in any particular town. There are over 400 buildings. It’s just a fascinating place with a lot of character and history behind it.”
He was involved in work to strengthen Taupo¯ Quay buildings to house the Department of Conservation and Sarjeant on the Quay, and he was offered a building to test towards destruction.
It was 35B Victoria Ave, the twostorey unoccupied brick building behind George’s Fisheries.
His team set up experiments to see how its upstairs wooden floor — in far from ideal condition — would perform under strong shaking. At the same time they protected the building’s other elements and kept themselves safe.
“That was one of the more exciting
Whanganui has a lot of brick buildings around Dmytro Dizhu
testing that we were doing,” Dizhur said. It achieved international recognition and got New Zealand building guidelines updated.
Then the Christchurch earthquakes happened, and Dizhur and team were there for nearly a year to record the result of the shaking on the city’s many masonry buildings.
A good portion of them had been strengthened already, which made the results especially interesting.
The team “documented every single masonry building in existence, the biggest database in the world”.
The shaking produced a mishmash of results. Some of the strengthening worked and some didn’t.
Christchurch lost more than 90 per cent of its old brick buildings.
Thirty-nine people were killed by masonry buildings in the quakes — about 20 per cent of the deaths. Most of the fatalities were caused by items like parapets falling on people.
With other buildings, whole facades collapsed and crushed cars and buses in the street below.
For several years Dizhur studied the Christchurch results and found a lot of tools and methods for strengthening buildings.
He compares a large rectangular building to a cardboard shoebox.
“If you remove the lid, the box is quite flimsy. Put the lid on top and it’s much sturdier.”
So, in a building, tying the walls, floors and roof together makes for more strength. Other means of strengthening include coatings to exterior surfaces, or carbon fibre strips cut and glued into brickwork, or the addition of extra columns and pillars.
There is no one solution for strengthening, he said, but a “toolbox” available.
Which methods are used will depend on the building itself and the values it must retain.
“Each one is unique and has to be addressed in a unique way.” The result of the study is Dizhur’s book Structural Performance, an illustrated case study of 52 of the 650 Christchurch buildings.
Dizhur said he hoped it would make buildings better and save lives and businesses, and that research would continue to find new and better “tools”.
To that end all the money from sales would be put into scholarships for passionate young engineers.
He’s hoping new tools will make it cheaper and more attractive for owners to strengthen buildings than to demolish them.
He has his own project, the Johnstone & Co building that stands beside the Whanganui City Bridge in Taupo¯ Quay. It’s quite a challenge — 30m wide with 10m facing onto the street, and three storeys tall, with an earthquake rating less than 33 per cent of new building standard.
He could have started with an easier building, but this one would be interesting and show others what’s possible, he said.
“The reason why
I
like
[old masonry buildings] is because they are so challenging, working with what you have got. You need to understand how it was built, how it was changed during its 120-year life, what alterations have been done, how your new structure will impact the current tenants and how it will change the architectural feel for the space.”
He bought the building in 2013, had it painted last year and now has a plan for strengthening it, a resource consent and some Heritage Equip funding. The Johnstone building is not listed with Heritage New Zealand, but it is important for the Whanganui streetscape, he said, and it has a rich history.
One of the main changes will be to extend a partition wall in the lower storey up through the other two. He’ll also remove some parapets, and stiffen the ceilings by adding a plywood layer.
The facade will be tied to the floors and roof, using a system of screws that link timber to brick.
He intends to begin “hands on” strengthening work within the next six months.
HPhil Pennington of RNZ ow do officials in Wellington come to take a small farm away from a struggling school in Taihape, when they said they wouldn’t sell it if the children still used it?
The local MP, the former principal and school board chair, all say it amounts to the government stealing the farm from the town.
Taihape locals pitched in to buy and set up a 12ha farm for students 30 years ago.
But they didn’t put the farm in a separate trust — a mistake that has, from then till now, curtailed investment and plans for the land.
The college was closed in 2004.
Emails and documents released under the Official Information Act show the Ministry of Education warned the board that transferring the farm to a trust “may be considered misappropriation of publicly-owned property and . . . is likely to be unlawful”.
That put a blunt end to the efforts of Marlene Harris, the college’s board chair in 2004, to set up a trust. It was a “threatening’ letter, she said.
“The ministry never gave us the time of day.”
But the officials did offer this reassurance: “The ministry has no reason to believe that the school farm will not be a community asset for as long as the community wishes to see it as part of its education facilities.”
Ten years later, in 2014, the ministry sold the land to another part of the government, and from there it was put into the Treaty settlements landbank.
The farm is now leased by Taihape Area School.
The principal for a decade, until early 2020, Richard McMillan, said the lease arrangement put them off investing in it in the way they wanted to.
“The farm was a crucial resource for our school,” he said. The ministry told Education Minister Chris Hipkins in 2017 that it would never have sold the farm if it had known it was still being used.
“Unfortunately, there had been no formal ‘reassignment’ of the property following the closure of Taihape College, and we were unaware the Area School was using it for educational delivery,” it said in a briefing.
“Had this been understood prior to 2014, the land would not have been placed in disposal.” The briefing was signed by the current head of the ministry’s education infrastructure service, Kim Shannon, who had delegated authority to dispose of the farm.
McMillan said he never got a call from Shannon or any other official prior to 2014 to check if his school was using the farm.
Dave Randell, the principal who set up the farm in 1989, was not surprised at the ministry’s dealings with McMillan.
“All they had to do was ask, it was as simple as that.”
In fact, email records show the ministry’s focus in 2014 was not on whether students were using the farm, but on paperwork. Finding the ownership papers “is the only way in which there is any chance of preventing the disposal process for the land being progressed”, an official told the school.
“I’m happy to do what I can to assist you in this, but without documented evidence to support the school’s claim to ownership, there really is little that can be done.”
The fact the farm had not been protected within a trust in 2004-5, seemed to have been forgotten by all sides. McMillan and his school board were still fighting for the farm to be returned to school ownership up to 2020, when he retired.
“To be honest, it does feel a bit like it’s been stolen,” he said. “We were never actually informed by the ministry directly that the farm had gone into [the] landbank. We found out when we were making inquiries with them about something else.”
The farm was “a prickly pear in the consolidation” of assets, said Abie Swart, now in South Africa, the last principal of college and the founding principal of the Taihape Area School.
“The MoE cannot and has never proved that the farm belonged to them,” he said. “No college funds were used to purchase this land. However, college funds were used to maintain the farm. But the latter cannot be used as a reason to claim ownership and to dispose of it.”
The land was first offered back to its original owners, as ministry processes dictate. But the farmer who had sold it cheaply to the school in 1989, Jim Cherry, had died, and his daughter-in-law Jean Cherry told RNZ that by that stage, 25 years later, the family did not have a use for the land.
Most Taihape people did not have a problem with how the farm had passed to the government, and was on a lease till 2027, according to the area school’s new principal Craig Dredge.
Education Minister Hipkins said the school, iwi and council supported the current situation. But Swart did not agree.
“The community members were vocal about this issue when they heard about the intention to sell, as it never belonged to the MoE,” he said.
This was echoed by Andy Law, the former chairman and long-time school board member till late 2020, who headed the appeal to the Ombudsman.
“A large section of the community are very upset about the loss of the farm, so how can you say everyone is happy with the ‘direction of the waka’ [as Dredge had said]?
“If the farm is not returned, we may well lose access altogether and at best will be
paying rent instead of making a profit to use within the school. How is that good for the school?”
If iwi ultimately got the land, it would not be fair on them to lease it to the school for under market rates, Law said. “How could anyone think the loss of land worth $800,000 good for our business?”
The briefing to Hipkins in 2017 was triggered by Rangit¯ıkei National MP Ian McKelvie, who had raised the farm ownership problem with Hipkins and Speaker of the House, Trevor Mallard.
“I’ve been in meetings with about three education ministers [or associate ministers] over this issue,” McKelvie said.
“I’ve also been involved in meetings with the current Speaker, who was the minister at the time this transaction took place, and fully understood this piece of land belonged to the community.
“He [Mallard] undertook to try and resolve this situation three years ago, and obviously hasn’t been able to.”
Mallard’s office told RNZ: “The only comment the Speaker would make is to note that attempts go back five-plus years.”
Mallard agreed the school owned the farm. The ministry, in its 2017 briefing after McKelvie’s intervention, said: “Now that the land is no longer owned by the ministry, we have taken all possible steps to ensure no interruption to the school’s educational activities” by setting up a lease.
The school may yet win an investigation by the Ombudsman. An Ombudsman’s decision would decide the next step, said the ministry, which won’t say if the school could be compensated.
Jean Cherry thinks compensation is due. “That school is in dire straits, in need of money for the rebuild. If they could get back this parcel of land, that could go into the college kitty,” she said.
The Crown put together a proposal to take the farm out of the Treaty landbank, but this failed.
The Mo¯kai Pa¯tea Waitangi Claims Trust represents four iwi — Nga¯i Te Ohuake, Nga¯ti Hauiti, Nga¯ti Tamako¯piri and Nga¯ti Whitikaupeka. It declined to comment.
District councillor Tracey Hiroa was on the school board for nine years till 2018, and works for Mokai Patea Services.
She cannot speak for the Mokai Patea Waitangi Claims Trust, but said the longrunning angst over the farm was not due to iwi.
“Quite frankly, the ministry was putting iwi in the middle of a conversation that iwi had no control of,” she said.
“The community’s getting blamed and iwi are getting thrown in the middle of something as if it’s their fault when in reality they had no say in it. The reality is the iwi owns nothing.”
The farm is landbanked with Land Information New Zealand, in an area where Treaty settlement negotiations have yet to begin.
It could only be released with Cabinet approval, said the new Crown agency, Te Arawhiti.
The Education Ministry told Hipkins in 2017 that once the Mo¯kai Pa¯tea claim was settled, “we will be able to put in place a long-term solution for the school and wider network”.
In 2021, that is not in sight. The ministry had offered financial help to maintain the farm but the school had yet to take up the offer, it said.
Ann Abernethy taught students on the college farm for years, and now heads the Taihape community board.
The farm’s fate had not come up at the board, but she said she was happy to raise it.
“I am sure the town does care about the farm, it cares very much about education as a whole here.”