Christchurch earthquake September 2010: Manchester Courts

Manchester Courts is a seven-storey building on Manchester Street in the city centre. It was built in the early 1900s and at the time was the first "skyscraper" in Christchurch. It's a listed heritage building, but unfortunately it was badly damaged in the earthquake and is very dangerous at the moment. A 5.5 or bigger aftershock would probably send it crashing to the ground.

This is how it looked before September 4th:

This is how it looked straight after the earthquake:

And this is how it looked last time I saw it:

 

That is normally one of the busiest streets in the city centre, and it is very strange to see it blocked off and completely empty of cars and pedestrians. Obviously the businesses in the immediate vicinity have been forced to close as well, which must be causing a lot of problems for their owners, staff, and customers. I found this out the hard way when I went on a lunchtime trip to Dick Smith's to buy a new pair of earphones, completely forgetting that Dick Smith's was located on this corner.

The demolition was bitterly opposed by those who thought the building should be saved at all costs, although I don't remember seeing any useful suggestions about how to raise the many millions of dollars that would require. If the building had a steel frame there might have been some hope for it, and newspaper reports from the time it was built suggested that there might actually be a steel frame, but that turned out to not be the case. Engineers used radar to scan for a steel frame and saw nothing, and then they drilled into the supporting pillars and found nothing but brick. The only steel is in some horizontal beams and internal columns, not in any of the load-bearing features.

The demolition is expected to take six weeks or so, assuming that Mother Nature doesn't speed things along. There is a webcam here where you can follow its progress (use that link, don't rely on this photo updating itself):