S7 EP 2: Jordan Bartlett, Summer Series

Jordan brings his seismic energy to discuss the importance of Resilience design for Building buildings to ensure minimal impact if disaster strikes. 

If you'd like to learn more about the AHDC, please connect with us on our website www.aushdc.org.au or on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/aushdc.

Transcript

[00:00:00] David Cummins: G'day and welcome to the Australian Health Design Council podcast series, Health Design on the Go. I'm your host David Cummins, and today we're speaking to Jordan Bartlett, who is Australia's earthquake resistance specialist. 

[00:00:28] Jordan is infectious with his passion and knowledge about earthquake protection for buildings. With a background in business and applied science, Jordan has paused a seismic career around earthquakes. 

[00:00:39] He is now studying a Master's of Disaster Resilience and Sustainable Development at University of Newcastle. We welcome Jordan to speak to us today about earthquake protection of buildings and how best we can design, plan, and build more sustainable and resilient buildings.

[00:00:53] Welcome Jordan. Thank you for your time to be here. 

[00:00:55] Jordan Bartlett: G'day Dave and thank you. 

[00:00:57] David Cummins: It's a very interesting career choice. How did you grow to become one of Australia's seismic specialists? 

[00:01:04] Jordan Bartlett: Oh dear... one day I was sitting in a room full of people designing massive hospitals and other facilities, and I watched the people who'd written the standard presenting and I'd read all their presentations because I was a coordinator of the event.

[00:01:16] And I can see this look on people's faces of dismay and loss. And I'm like.. "this is simple, isn't it?" And I continue to travel around the country later giving presentations on the basics with ceilings and other things. 

[00:01:27] And before you know it, it was growing and growing, I don't like the word expert, I just like to say it's something that I'm very passionate about but I can help people with the process. 

[00:01:36] There's real experts out there, but they're engaged in a lot of other things. So I'm kind of like the sheep dog. 

[00:01:42] David Cummins: In the world of earthquakes, I imagine Australia is ranks quite low when you compare us to the likes of New Zealand, Japan, America. Or am I completely wrong when it comes to earthquakes in Australia. Are there more earthquakes in Australia than people are aware of? 

[00:01:57] Jordan Bartlett: Okay, so apparently in the last presentation I was in with experts 10% of the world's earthquakes are intra plate where the other 90% are interplate on the edges.

[00:02:09] So if we take two pavlovas, we put them next to each other and rub them a bit, that's New Zealand. That's plate to plate boundary, bit of uplift, bit of different actions. In the middle of them, if you push those two together, the actual pavlovas will pop in the middle and crack.

[00:02:23] And that's what we see here in Australia. We've got a lot of stresses and we have faults we don't even know about because, well, to be honest, the European settlers haven't been here long enough, but the indigenous cultures actually knew about earthquakes.

[00:02:35] They have a story about Newcastle, that there's a angry kangaroo out Nobby's Island and when they get earthquakes, that was in their story, They'll were storytelling. 

[00:02:43] We don't know enough in our European history to be able to say what's happened. But we have measured a lot in the last 150 years, and we try to use that data. 

[00:02:53] David Cummins: Newcastle was a very interesting one, correct me if I'm wrong, that would be the site of one of Australia's worst earthquakes where there were fatalities. 

[00:02:59] Is that correct? 

[00:03:01] Jordan Bartlett: I will say yes. 

[00:03:02] There was only 13. I say only... had it been a workday, you would've had three to 500 people killed that day. So with the number of buildings that failed, it was three days after Christmas.

[00:03:13] It was a shutdown city, a steel city. Besides the mining that was still going on that day, and people were really stressed, they thought it was a mining failure. There was a bus strike, so there wasn't many people in town. 

[00:03:24] Reality is, we dodged a massive ball at that day and it would show up massively against all other disasters we've registered here in Australia. 

[00:03:31] David Cummins: So how did that event change design standards, buildability guides. How, according to me, with my limited knowledge, that was one of the critical components in earthquake history in Australia, where it really did make a change on a national and a local level.

[00:03:50] Is that correct? 

[00:03:51] Jordan Bartlett: I will paraphrase from what I've learned from others. 

[00:03:53] Yes. We had it written into some of our standards not as 1170, part four at the time, but as 1170, part four was created as a result. So by 1993 the Committee had it published, but effectively they were rewriting it based on as much data as they could capture from around the world and looking at what they'd seen in Australia to create a workable but not destroying the construction industry in a sense of making it over the top.

[00:04:17] And it's been through multiple iterations since then. 

[00:04:20] Then the year after that earthquake, there was a massive event in California, which saw all these buildings that had been designed for earthquake, these ductile structures could actually move. 

[00:04:29] They weren't pancaking from the bottom floor. They weren't soft-storey failing. But once you start designing something for the movement, well now you've gotta improve everything you fit into it. 

[00:04:39] If you allow a building to be ductile, the facades will disconnect and fall into the street, which has happened in Wellington, I think 2012.

[00:04:46] Once you start building in movement, you've gotta allow for that movement with everything else. And that's where I got involved, non-structural elements, section eight. 

[00:04:54] David Cummins: Yeah. Interesting. 

[00:04:55] And so in the world of healthcare and health design, I'm always positive in that Newcastle earthquake, some of the healthcare was impacted as well, wasn't it?

[00:05:03] So what actually happened in that situation? 

[00:05:06] Jordan Bartlett: I can't actually speak to that one because I haven't done enough research around that. I've seen the presentations have been to Newcastle for the last earthquake conference in 2019. There they had a historical talk about it, but we didn't look at the medical facilities.

[00:05:19] If I talk about the 94 event into the us their hospital, the building had been brilliantly performing as a structure, nearly no damage, but the non-structural tore apart. 

[00:05:29] If we take Christchurch, my understanding is that the water tanks on the top of the building burst and flooded down through the lift shafts.

[00:05:37] Now, if you lose your lift shafts or your operating theatres are on the second, third floor, you've got people that are vulnerable that can't actually move for themselves. They're in hospital for a reason. 

[00:05:46] So the most vulnerable people in most of these natural hazard events, they don't die a result of the acts, of the elements, but they become the most vulnerable in those situations.

[00:05:55] So you want your health facilities, if they're emergency management, like they're part of the emergency, the state emergency management plan, you want them to remain serviceable or operational for immediate use. 

[00:06:08] Now that could be 15 minutes after the earthquake event, you are going to have ambulances arriving, people arriving from the street.

[00:06:14] What they were doing in 94 with the Northridge event, they were doing triage in the street, but they were evacuating the hospital out. 

[00:06:21] Because you've got high energy, you've got gases, you've got all these energy damage related elements that create a really unsafe environment. 

[00:06:29] David Cummins: Yeah, it's really interesting.

[00:06:30] I suppose a lot of people just think of the earthquake, but actually, you've gone into that after fact of earthquakes. I would say during a disaster, hospitals would become the heart and the control center for many places. 

[00:06:42] How would you rate Australian healthcare in relation to earthquake resistance today? I. 

[00:06:47] Jordan Bartlett: It is hard to say because we haven't done enough, what would you say, site evaluations. A lot of people don't want to have their facility reviewed. I'll speak to the Royal Adelaide Hospital because I spent this morning with the head designer.

[00:06:59] They designed that facility to remain serviceable, they designed each part of the structure to be able to have a bit of torsion absorb the energy, but not tear apart the services. So the services are treated so that when you go from building to building, they're kind of like a zigzag so that you can actually squeeze them.

[00:07:16] They've got flexible joins, so the whole building can be moving, madly. But these systems are not becoming dangerous, they're not cracking apart, they're remaining operational, and then you've got the diesel supply for the generators to be able to run for maybe 24 hours, not four hours, like majority of hospitals maybe or so forth.

[00:07:34] That place can run as an island. It goes into island mode and it can store sewer. Where I am right now is a building with sewer storage so that you can actually have a truck come every second day and or continuously. So you remain operational, you're not creating an unsafe environment.

[00:07:50] David Cummins: So that's the Royal Adelaide which only got commissioned a few years ago. Would I be correcting to say not every hospital has that capacity in Australia? 

[00:07:59] Jordan Bartlett: I would be very interested... so if I can flip the topic over, what is the business continuity plan of that facility? So from a management point of view, you should be giving your actual design brief team.

[00:08:13] Your actual business continuity, what do you plan to do when the, you know... If we have a large heat event and we start browning out across the power network, how long do we expect that hospital to operate before the diesels come in? 

[00:08:25] And if the sewer network goes down or the potable water and the public is compromised by some sort of event, how long can you run on your own water supply?

[00:08:34] We want to know capacity and especially under the new NEMA (National Emergency Management Authority) it'll be very interesting to see where the critical infrastructure is measured.

[00:08:45] David Cummins: So you and I have known each other for a few years now, and I remember one of the first things you ever told me was that, yes, there are Australian Standards, but somehow it gets missed. 

[00:08:55] I'm still very interested in that point where designers and healthcare professionals could actually miss part of the building code of Australia. Do you mind just talking a little bit more about that? 

[00:09:04] Jordan Bartlett: Yeah, yeah.

[00:09:05] I'm on the standards committee for AS1170, Part 4 (Earthquake actions in Australia) and previously there wasn't people on that committee who actually were in the non-structural environment. 

[00:09:15] So to start with, we had all these academic and practicing structural engineers and really real professionals that weren't actually in this space. It was put into the code, but it wasn't being completed by those people too often.

[00:09:29] So you haven't tested all of this. So, a lot of it is people, they're on a project and suddenly they're pulled up by somebody.. A certifier might go, " I need all of this signed off to the Earthquake Standard", and the person just looks at and go, "no, mate, that's a structure... that's a structural engineer's job".

[00:09:42] But the non-structural elements in a medical facility account for between 80% and 85% of the build cost. These people will have won the job, and if they're competing with somebody else who's done it before, they're going to win the job because they've under budgeted.

[00:09:56] You need it to start off in the brief, the standard's written in the specs, but nobody's actually designed it in to start with, for the non-structural. It's something that's been done at the end, if people know it. 

[00:10:07] Now, I work up at the front end now, getting this in a post-disaster facilities, but you really need a deliverable. The tender must have a line item that says "seismic design of fire pipes".

[00:10:18] All these things. If you don't put it in there, it doesn't exist. If you can't measure it, you can't improve it type thing. 

[00:10:23] David Cummins: And how does it get a approved then? How does it get accredited if it's not to Australian Standards?

[00:10:28] Jordan Bartlett: How did cladding get on buildings if it wasn't to the Australian Standards? People do what they know. 

[00:10:32] They have experience, but experience is not knowledge. So I run presentations for firms around the country to make it clear what's the requirements upfront, but still there'd be someone in the room, they're thinking about the project they're working on that moment going, "I haven't done this".

[00:10:48] And people start to shut down because it becomes too hard. You have to make it really clear upfront so that people can deliver it at the end. You need a bit of peer review because if someone doesn't check, you've done your homework, you don't do it. 

[00:10:59] I still get engineers and builders phone me up and go, mate, what is all of this? I've never done it. 

[00:11:03] So there's a lot of bubbles.

[00:11:05] David Cummins: So just say I'm a architect or a builder and I've built this brand new hospital of 10 storeys and I have not been compliant with Australian Standards. How easy is it to retrofit and to protect a hospital to become compliant and earthquake resistant?

[00:11:24] Jordan Bartlett: Some of the best companies in this country will not deliver a project without doing it. 

[00:11:29] And if I can be cheeky, some in Northern Territory were delivered with this done. And the certifier said in a meeting.. to me " Oh, is that what all those braces were? I wonder what those were". 

[00:11:38] So, I can give credit to one of the tier ones, does it every time. But if you get to the end of your project, there's some challenges around certain elements around the walls will have been sheeted and so forth, but maybe most of the building services, you can still get to those because they all need to be serviced.

[00:11:52] Safety and design, access to service and all that sort of stuff. Most of the time you still can get access to a lot of stuff. You can protect the most important elements. 

[00:12:01] Now a generator. Yep, it's on vibration mounts. But are those vibration mounts designed for lateral? Can you lift that thing up, put the right elements in there? 

[00:12:09] You can retrofit, but if it's gone live as a warm environment, hot environment, that's challenging and slow. 

[00:12:15] It's a big question, mate, big question. 

[00:12:18] David Cummins: And expensive, I imagine. 

[00:12:19] Jordan Bartlett: Very. 

[00:12:20] No, very, especially If you've got a live environment you can't take out the systems or so forth for a short time.

[00:12:27] David Cummins: So in reference to other earthquakes in this zone, I think Wellington's had quite a few earthquakes. I'm pretty sure in that situation, a few buildings collapsed. Do you know much about the whole Wellington earthquake situation and the history there? 

[00:12:41] Jordan Bartlett: Oh, that's a good one actually. You've now thrown me off a little bit, but the shaky isles, a lot of Wellington is on soils that I believe are alluvial.

[00:12:49] So even though it's got a lot of action in the area, it doesn't have the greatest bases around there so there's a lot more movement. 

[00:12:54] There were three buildings that I know of that failed in one event, the structure moved too much, destroyed the entire interior. So they rebuilt it and they had a $10 million rebuild, $20 million business continuity loss, as a result of all the relocation. 

[00:13:10] In the next event, the KU event, the buildings moved just as much, again, damaged everything terribly and they just decided to just destroy the three buildings, because if the structure displaces too much, if it's not stiffened up enough, the inter-storey drift, everything's going to get torn apart.

[00:13:26] David Cummins: So what should we, as designers and builders and construction experts and health industry specialists, what should we do to try and protect not only ourselves, our community, our patients, but also noting that we will become a very central hub if a huge earthquake does hit anywhere in Australia?

[00:13:45] Jordan Bartlett: My dream run is that a company actually has a business continuity plan to start with, and they know how much it's going to cost them to be down for 12 hours, two days, whatever. You could be delivering dialysis, all these things... how long can the community go without that service? 

[00:14:01] So once you've got your maximum allowable outage, you can then look at, "okay, we want this facility to remain serviceable for immediate use, or we want to be able to reestablish ourselves somewhere else".

[00:14:12] We want to be clear about that so that the designers actually know what they need to do. The structural engineer will take the importance level of that building. 

[00:14:19] They'll do a structural design, then we want to know how much the building's designed to move in a 500 year event, and therefore do we need to design all the other elements that are going in there to allow for that movement. 

[00:14:32] And then you look at the systems that build the capacity to run for the because you've got a response time, you've got a recovery time, and then you're going back to business as usual, what times are reasonable and how much impact on your business financially, but also your clients and your obligations under any state or agreements.

[00:14:53] David Cummins: And surely as you said earlier, early interaction, making sure it's part of the tender documentation and no doubt to make seismic structure a priority and a KPI during tender and design documentation because we've all sat around user groups and design groups, and I must admit it's been talked about very, very small amounts and that's in a 17 year career. 

[00:15:14] So I don't think there is enough communication and education about this topic. 

[00:15:19] Jordan Bartlett: Yeah, it's 13 years since non-structural elements was mandated by the building code since 2010 and I'm still walking into facilities and finding gaps like crazy. 

[00:15:29] And yeah, as you can tell, the builders either know about it and people are going, is this a seismic job?

[00:15:34] And I'm like... Every building's a seismic job. You should be doing this in every Class 2 to 9 building. So let's protect society. 

[00:15:40] But when you address this, you actually address multiple other failures across our systems. So well, it is a seismic event. Let's do the best we can. 

[00:15:48] David Cummins: Jordan, thank you so much for your time. I think anyone that's met you always walks away with some knowledge and inspiration. 

[00:15:55] And certainly since I've met you in the last few years, I've made sure that it is a topic that we discuss from a builder point of view, from a hospital point of view, but also from a design point of view.

[00:16:04] So I think the more we get the word out there, the more protected we are. And I think also, especially for the fact that, as you said, we will become the heart when disaster strikes so we have to make sure that we look after ourselves, our patients, and our community. 

[00:16:17] So thank you so much for your passion in this field.

[00:16:20] I don't think I've ever met another seismic specialist. You're by far the most passionate I know and we welcome you and thank you so much for all your hardworking dedication to this field. 

[00:16:29] Jordan Bartlett: Cheers, David. Thanks for your time. 

[00:16:31] David Cummins: You have been listening to the Australian Health Design Council podcast series, Health Design on the Go.

[00:16:36] If you'd like to learn more about the AHDC, please connect with us on LinkedIn or our website. 

[00:16:40] Thank you for listening.