An Innovative Approach To Condition And Damage Assessment Of Land Drainage Assets

Land drainage and stormwater assets are often not prioritised when balancing the many challenges that confront councils’ budget restrictions for managing extensive asset portfolios. However, these assets have a large potential to cause issues to the communities surrounding them. 

This paper seeks to share the lessons learnt from several condition and damage assessments carried out by Christchurch City Council (CCC) on open channel assets following the Canterbury Earthquake sequence. The paper shows how valuable information and knowledge can be gathered from innovative approaches. The paper shares lessons on criticality assessments, condition and damage inspection, and tools to help share and visualise the outputs. The paper also identifies a recommended approach for undertaking these studies across a range of assets in public and private ownership in New Zealand. 

The paper focuses on a condition assessment project carried out by Opus International Consultants that covered 20km of concrete lined drains in Christchurch City. The project ultimately sought to inform a renewals strategy for the assets based on an integrated solution involving criticality, and condition and damage assessment. The project also involved innovations such as a geo-referenced video survey that were developed to enhance the final output of the project.