Kaikoura Earthquake repair updates

I stopped posting the reports weekly as it was taking me a lot of time to pull all the bits out of them and illustrate, considering the information in them isn't always up to date and they tend to come out as much as a week after the stated date of publication.

The focus has all been on the highway with the well publicised closures of SH1 south of Kaikoura due to a big new slip between Puketa and Goose Bay. However there has been work on the Main North Line in particular at several overbridge sites at Parnassus, Waima and Oaro where a lot of repairs have been needed. Also the main line and loop are being relaid at Pines just south of Clarence where there is a big problem with an upthrust in the ground of four metres resulting in suddenly changed ground levels, this forced the track well off its normal alignment and has also affected the highway. The nearby Clarence River bridge which is quite a major structure needs significant work and the highway bridge was also affected. At Mangamaunu both the highway and the railway are being realigned around a major slip site, which I think means they are building new embankment and seawall probably. There are also five railway tunnels being repaired.

The aerial photos I have been making use of only cover a coastal strip (I had hoped they would include the inland highway route, unfortunately this is not the case) but Google Earth has updated its coverage for much of the area to cover the timeframe after the quakes, thus we can have a view of the whole route although their resolution is nowhere near as good. However the Linz photos do cover a stretch of SH1 between Hundalee and Oaro which is well separated from the railway line, this is really the only major route differentiation along nearly all of the Picton-Chch highway.

If you want to have a look at the Linz aerial photos yourself in a web browser this is pretty easy to do. Just go to the address below:

• https://data.linz.govt.nz/layer/3529-kaikoura-earthquake-02m-aerial-photos-2016/

On the left side should be the description of the data layer -title is 

Kaikoura Earthquake 0.2m Aerial Photos (2016)

You can see near the top left an orange + sign. Just click that (it should then change into a red - sign) and the layer is loaded onto the map shown at the right. Then just drag, zoom, scroll etc that map until the section Parnassus-Ward comes into view and you should be able to see the aerial photos.

State Highway 1 south of Kaikoura still closed as slip clearing work continues

This is because of the big slip at Rosy Morn between Puketa and Goose Bay. 10,000 cubic metres is a lot, and it's nowhere near the biggest slip on the route. There is still a lot of problems with damage from the quakes all over SH1 between Claverley and Clarence and this really emphasises the fragility of the area and how much work is needed to fix it up.

• http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/91812908/state-highway-1-south-of-kaikoura-still-closed-as-slip-clearing-work-continues

More damage to challenged Napier-Gisborne Line

In the middle of this picture you can see a new washout about 30 metres long between Tunnels 16 and 17 on the Napier-Gisborne line in the Whareratas. This aerial image on Google Earth is dated 3/3/2016. Looking at other photos damage has occurred in other areas as well. 

Given how fragile this section is, it is highly likely the recent heavy rainfall events of a couple of cyclones have caused more damage. There is a whole lot of this area that has not got footage later than 2011 so we can't actually see anything from the past five or six years on GE. However there is more recent coverage for the HBRC side of the boundary from 2014-15 and this shows that the above washout has probably occurred between 2015-16.