their formal and bureaucratic nature means they are also slow to adapt and change. Did you know that the government can support businesses in their endeavours to become more prepared for events which connect us all in the face of a real crisis? Organisation resilience is tested to the limits when a disaster occurs, and the fact that they are unexpected and produce unintended consequences means that even the best operational plans can quickly unravel. It’s also easy to assume that other businesses in your sector, supply chain or immediate proximity all have access to the same or higher quality information, and that they will have rehearsed recovery scenarios and trained staff. This is a flawed assumption that can leave an organisation exposed in the face of an actual crisis situation. In a time when community resilience is crucial – facing terrorist attacks, weather ‘bombs’, pandemics and the like – we need to stand together in a ‘joined up’ approach in order to weather the rising tides. Dr Bridgette Sullivan-Taylor is a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland Business School’s Graduate School of Management, specialising in organisational resilience in the face of crisis. Much of her work was conducted in the United Kingdom with Aston and Warwick Business Schools. 10 MARCH 2016 QUAKE-PROOF PLANT FOR FONTERRA A unique world-leading whole milk drying plant built in the Manawatu by Fonterra has a little more to it than just bricks and mortar…it has been designed to withstand a one-in-2500-year earthquake without damage. The plant, built over the past two years on Fonterra’s earthquake-threatened Pahiatua site, is believed to be the first of its kind in the world and is also amongst the largest globally with a capacity of 15 tons of milk per hour. In an effort to speed things up and keep costs down, the building’s design was a copy of the Darfield 1 dryer, but with base isolation that would allow the building to move, should a quake hit. Only a handful of buildings in New Zealand are protected in this way, including the Parliament building and Te Papa in Wellington. The whole plant weighs upwards of 20,000 tons, including its 40-metre-high drying tower, all of which sits on 50 triple friction pendulum bearings that will allow the whole construction to move up to 900mm in any lateral direction in the event of a quake. Each 1.4m square bearing weighs 2.7 tons and has a Teflon centre to reduce friction. Pahiatua, 20km from Palmerston North, lies on an earthquake fault line and was last hit by a 7.6 magnitude quake in 1934. Project manager Gary Reynolds says the plant has changed the way construction was done in New Zealand. “There was some steep learning but if we had a problem we just talked it through and found a solution together. It was a very refreshing approach.” “In a time when community resilience is crucial – facing terrorist attacks, weather ‘bombs’, pandemics and the like – we need to stand together in a ‘joined up’ approach in order to weather the rising tides.”
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