Firth's RibRaft flooring system proves its worth in Christchurch quakes
< Back Friday, 8 July 2011Firth's Southern Regional Manager, Dominic Sutton has had his own experience of just how well the RibRaft® flooring system performs during the recent Canterbury earthquakes.
Dominic lives in Cashmere and built a granny flat five years ago for his mother in-law on the same property as his weatherboard home. The granny flat is a two-story house constructed from Firth 20 series masonry blocks with a concrete mid floor and a RibRaft foundation.
Dominic's home is an older weather board home,
built in the late 1940s on a more traditional unreinforced concrete
foundation - this did not stand up to the second big earthquake to
hit the region but the granny flat did.
"Come February 22 our house exploded and the foundations are now broken and ruptured in multiple places," says Sutton. "Basically the house twisted and vibrated on itself and has now come off its foundation and we have not been able to live in it since then," he says.
Amazingly the granny flat had no structural damage at all
despite the fact that the two dwellings are immediately next door
to each other and would have been hit by the same the shock
wave.
"There is some minor cosmetic damage - a small amount of broken gib - but my mother in law is still living there," says Sutton. "As the RibRaft system floats on top of the ground when the ground starts shaking it can largely mitigate the effect of lateral spreading," he says.
Firth Industries RibRaft
® EQ flooring system has been designed to comply with
the specifications of the Department of Building and Housing
approved flooring solutions for the Christchurch rebuild.
Sutton says he has spoken with many of the occupants of homes with RibRaft floors and they are very pleased with their purchasing decision to pay a bit more for this type of floor.