Protesters storm Christchurch CBD cordon

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bnapi

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#79707 21-Mar-2011 17:46

Personally I can understand why the protesters stormed the christchurch cordon in the cbd to get access to their businesses:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-earthquake/4789651/Christchurch-earthquake-anger-erupts

The reasons I understand them is because of:

1)Last week prince william was given a tour inside the cordon. He doesn't even have a business inside there. Instead of giving prince william a tour, the officials should have taken business owners instead to get their tools.

2)I think I read in media reports that the demolition workers stopped work for the 1 minutes silence. They should have kept working. Getting businesses up and running is more important than 1 minutes silence.

3)I think I have heard the police use the argument of it being too dangerous for people to enter their damaged buildings and it puts emergency workers lives at risk. It is dangerous to go rock climbing without supervision but it is legal even though it puts emergency workers lives at risk if the rock climber gets into trouble. The thing is, emergency workers are choosing to put their lives at risk. If the police do not want to rescue people who go into their damaged buildings to retrieve tools then they should choose not to go and rescue the people so therefore their lives will not be at risk. If businesses leave christchurch it will lead to a lack of jobs and huge unemployment. The police should allow any cbd business owners and cbd residents to retrieve whatever they want from their business/house/apartment on their own even if the resident does not have proof their business or house is located inside the cordon because some people's papers are inside their buildings so they cannot prove they own the place. Very unlikely people will steal things because their vehicles are not allowed inside the cordon. If the police want to do patrols that is fine.

A friend of mine who has a business inside the cordon who says civil defence is being too slow to open up the cordon is requesting as many people as possible to actually phone call civil defence and tell them to hurry up and give business/residents access to the cordon any time they want without supervision. If anyone here on geekzone would like to help the phone number for civil defence's head office is at their site:
http://www.civildefence.govt.nz/memwebsite.nsf/wpg_URL/About-the-Ministry-Index?OpenDocument

Phone calls in numbers may make a difference.

gzt

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#450778 22-Mar-2011 15:26

I can also understand it. But, I think it is a difficult problem to solve.

Essentially the authorities concerned have decided on responsibility for the personal safety of everyone who goes inside that cordon.

So, a team would have to be established with responsibility of escorting people inside to retrieve items. There would be situations where part of a set of items is just too dangerous to retrieve items from a damaged premises. A team of this nature would need to be multi-disciplinary (police, engineering, SAR, etc) to maintain safety and control of the situation. Where there is demolition work in progress this complicates things further.Thought also needs to be given to encountering human remains during the item retrieval process.

Then you need to decide who gets to go first and for what purpose and how long. There will be arguments and heat about that and most people would like to deal with something else.

It is difficult to solve, but not impossible to help out a few cases by selecting areas known to have a safe path and premises and sending the team in with a person from the affected business.

It looks like the current strategy is the simplest possible. Demolish and bulldoze anything which has been assessed as an immediate danger to the ongoing efforts to demolish and bulldoze other things. Then demolish and bulldoze those other dangerous things. After that let people in to secure businesses -

- of course, I am guessing. From the lack of information you might think the actual plan is top secret, emergency powers, etc, etc.

Are journalists actually asking what the plan is, or is this a complete journalistic fail?

sbiddle

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#450788 22-Mar-2011 15:36

I think part of the problem is people's ideas that everything will be ok in a mater of months. It won't be. Several hundred business owners have been allowed and it seems many of these people seem to think they're more important than other people who have already registered on the website to gain access.

Many people will lose a lot from this quake and it's inevitable that many small business will go under. I don't think protesting the way they are is going to do a lot.

gzt

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#450796 22-Mar-2011 15:44

sbiddle: Several hundred business owners have been allowed [...]

I don't think that was mentioned in the stuff.co.nz coverage of the protest. Maybe I need to watch more tv.

kingjj

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#450872 22-Mar-2011 19:23

bnapi:
2)I think I read in media reports that the demolition workers stopped work for the 1 minutes silence. They should have kept working. Getting businesses up and running is more important than 1 minutes silence.

Seriously?! Stopping work for 1 Minutes silence as a mark of respect for those that lost their lives is a great achievement on their part. I would have been furious if they had not. One minute's silence is the very minimum that people can do for those in Chch. Besides 1 minutes work means nothing in the greater scheme of things, hours have probably been wasted on Toilet breaks and cups of Tea, do you want them to stop those as well?

sbiddle

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#450883 22-Mar-2011 19:37

gzt:
sbiddle: Several hundred business owners have been allowed [...]

I don't think that was mentioned in the stuff.co.nz coverage of the protest. Maybe I need to watch more tv.

It was in the news well over a week ago saying that CD were allowing access to some business owners.

On the radio this morning when the issue was discussed I heard reference to (and I wasn't paying a huge deal of attention) something like 2500 people who had registered and 400 had already ben granted access.

nakedmolerat

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#450892 22-Mar-2011 19:49

bnapi: I think I have heard the police use the argument of it being too dangerous for people to enter their damaged buildings and it puts emergency workers lives at risk. It is dangerous to go rock climbing without supervision but it is legal even though it puts emergency workers lives at risk if the rock climber gets into trouble. The thing is, emergency workers are choosing to put their lives at risk.

if they let people go inside, buildings went down and they got killed or hurt, i wonder who is going to be blamed?

the search and rescue team choose their job. but, they are not dogs or robots. they have families to feed. it is unnecessary and inhumane to risk their lives.

Dyson

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richms

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#451245 23-Mar-2011 21:43

IMO the cordons should have come down as soon as it was no longer a rescue operation.

I know after seeing what has happened there it would seriously change my response to any disaster where it was likely that an evacuation would be forced.

The fact that they can just keep extending this state of emergency as they do, preventing the free travel of people to their property where they could make their own assessment or hire independent experts to advise on the safety and any work done to the place to make it safe is crap.

Richard rich.ms

TheUngeek

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#451323 24-Mar-2011 08:53

You cannot have people wandering through that area. It's just not safe.
All those people moaning about how their building got knocked down without their permission and how they reckon it could have been saved, are they engineers? Are they qualified? NO! they are not.

TheUngeek

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#451335 24-Mar-2011 09:32

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-earthquake/4802843/37-buildings-on-critical-list

Can hardly be letting people in when there are still buildings fragile enough that they worry about adjacent work knocking them over!

South45

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#452141 26-Mar-2011 18:28

Wow. you'd think they'd appreciate life is not normal since the quake. I can undertsand the frustration. If someone dies in an aftershock while still in their shop, there would be all sorts of questions asked as to why they're there.

Simple sloution is to have them sign a form that they are in their at their own risk.