Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority

The NZ government set up the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) to lead recovery work following the devastating earthquakes that hit the Canterbury region from September 2010 into 2011.

Initially CERA set up a temporary emergency response web site using Google sites. Egressive was brought in to migrate this site to the Drupal content management system and help structure the site so it allowed CERA staff to more easily manage the content and make the more detailed content more discoverable and accessible to the public.

The visual style was designed to be simple and flexible given the natural progression CERA will go through during the recovery. The existing content was reviewed and structured to allow for this required flexibility while not moving the interface around constantly.

Two content areas received special attention to make them more useful to the different audiences visiting the site and to draw people in to access the wider range of information CERA needed to get to the public: Demolitions were turned from PDF documents to specific web content to allow for sorting and filtering, and the automated creation of statistics used by the Media. The aim was to create a historic reference of what was demolished and its status. Ross Becker made his definitive photos of the "Red Zone" in the CBD and other quake affected locations available to CERA and we used them to create a gallery of an areas many Canterbury residents were unable to access, and people elsewhere in the world are curious to see. These photos included location information which was subsequently used to automatically create a maps of all Demolitions and the 'Nearby Photos' associated with each photograph.

The site went live on the 26 July, 2011.