Engineers recall 'race against time' after quake | Manawatu-Wanganui News | Local News in Manawatu-Wanganui

"Emergency engineering" is how Wanganui geotechnical engineers Mark Frampton and Hamish Peters describe their work in Christchurch after the February 22, 2011 earthquake.

Mr Frampton and Mr Peters, who work for Opus Wanganui, went to Christchurch after the quake to help Opus Christchurch staff deal with the overwhelming amount of work that needed to be done in the Canterbury region.

When the call went out through the Opus networks for assistance, Mr Frampton and Mr Peters both volunteered to help, along with Opus staff from throughout New Zealand, Australia and even the United Kingdom.

Mr Frampton arrived in Christchurch just a couple of weeks after the quake, while Mr Peters went down a couple of months later.

The two men were assigned to work on a particular project in Lyttelton - a 5m-high retaining wall above the port that helped keep the state highway in place.

"That wall had failed and was leaning over," Mr Frampton said. "So I was involved with the re-design on that wall, and then Hamish came down and got involved with the repairs.

"It was deemed to be important - if the wall had collapsed completely, it would have cut off access to Lyttlelton," Mr Peters said.

Mr Frampton said the work was challenging, as the ground kept rumbling beneath them.

"We're talking about a large wall, leaning outwards at an angle, and every time there's an aftershock, the wall's moving by tens of millimetres."

Mr Peters said the work was "a race" to get the wall repaired before the worst happened.

"We were thinking, how many aftershocks can this wall take before it collapses?"

"It was like emergency engineering, I suppose," Mr Peters said.

The two men look at Wanganui, its land and buildings, in a different way since they returned home.

"It's really given an edge to the issue of earthquake-prone buildings - it's not something that we can put off for an indefinite period," Mr Frampton said.

"Wanganui also needs to think about how it will cope with liquefaction in an earthquake."