Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
2 Study Area and Data Description
Christchurch, the second-largest city of New Zealand and the gateway to the South
Island, locates on the edge of the Canterbury Plains, extending to the Southern
Alps. Since New Zealand situates on the tectonic plate boundary between the
Pacific Plate and the Australia-India Plate, the country suffers regular devastating
earthquakes. On the 22 February 2011, the 6.3-magnitude (on Richter scale)
earthquake struck the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. The earthquake caused
serious damage to buildings and residential houses, extensive liquefaction, sig-
nificant rock falls in areas of the Port Hills as well as considerable disruption to
road and rail networks, airport and port, electricity supplies and water and
wastewater systems.
Christchurch City declared a state of local emergency on 22 February 2011 and
an Emergency Operations Centre was activated in the City's Art Gallery to
manage the response. The co-ordination of response activities in Christchurch, via
the Canterbury Response Centre involves:
• The emergency services, including Urban Search and Rescue;
• Welfare agencies and services;
• Medical and health services;
• Lifeline utilities and restoration of services;
• Managing spontaneous volunteers.
• Management of the international dimension and offer of support.
• Management of logistic, in terms of procurement and distribution as well as co-
ordination between the Christchurch Response Centre and the National Crisis
Management Centre.
• Management of building safety evaluations.
• Management of building demolition and cordoned areas.
Based on real state of incidents and the response activities in the 2011
Christchurch earthquake, research data retrieved from ANZAA (
2011
) includes
damaged or collapsed buildings, closure areas, closed or damaged roads, closed
bridges, power failures, trapped people, broken waterspouts, hospitals, ware-
houses, shelters and welfare centers.
3 Methodology
The comparative review and evaluation of Sahana Eden and Ushahidi platforms
was organized into three stages.
Installation: Sahana Eden and Ushahidi platforms were downloaded from the
Sahana Software Foundation and Ushahidi main website and properly installed
according to their requirements. For instance, Sahana Eden requires Python and/or
Java Script programming language and database systems such as PostgreSQL
