ABSTRACT
Foodstuff South Island is one of the largest providers for groceries in New Zealand. Foodstuffs manage dozens of retail stores in the Canterbury Region of New Zealand and their supermarket network extends across the entire South Island. Their building portfolio, albeit fully compliant with the New Zealand Building Code, performed poorly after the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence. The principal cause for poor performance was excessive unrepairable foundation damage. Whilst several stores and distribution centres were severely damaged in the initial earthquake, others suffered from progressive deterioration as aftershocks continued. Repairs, reconstructions and new builds were part of the decade long rebuild process. Key part of the rebuild was to maintain the same building typology to ensure a consistent portfolio look and streamline construction. This in turn necessitated modification of the foundations and/or the ground to enable the similar building topology to be constructed on top of it despite grossly different ground performance. This paper will by way of example illustrate typical earthquake damage to the light commercial buildings, with focus on their foundations performance. The authors will discuss the asset owner’s need to provide much higher building resilience to avoid future earthquake damage, but also to ensure business continuity and safeguard access to food and general supplies after a major natural disaster. The paper will provide design details for a wide range of sites with different vulnerability to seismically induced ground damage. The foundation options will include sites with ground improvement using stone columns, geogrid reinforced load transfer platforms, large diameter bored concrete piles, steel screw piles, RibRafts and tied grillages of ground beams as well as shallow footings. The main aim of this paper is to discuss how foundation solutions, for essentially the same building, address the highly variable ground conditions and how a human centred approach directed the adopted design solutions.
