Personal narrative plays an important role in 54-year-old Duncan Gibb&’s teaching style. A general manager of the Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team, he leans on anecdotes from his own life in the lectures he gives, as was apparent from this native New Zealander&’s talk about “Collectively we are stronger — engineers generating collaborative solutions to strengthen community resilience post-disaster” in Kolkata last month, his last pit stop being the Narula Institute of Technology, a flagship college under the JIS Group Educational Initiatives as part of the 10th Brunel Lecture series.

Perhaps the topic wasn’t that interesting or maybe students were hardly interactive (probably because of his accent or the post-lunch session?) but a fraction were all ears and, according to one, “It&’s a good way to put a movie in your mind”.

When asked about the story behind his 30- year career in civil engineering, he naturally began talking of a journey sparked by a fascination for building bridges, granaries, buildings, aluminum dams, mudways… working in iron and nickel mines, etc. And then he spoke about moving his family 22 times, his children going to 13 different schools and so on. He said, “I am resilient to change and love traveLling, the reason why I took this job. In a job profile like ours, we are needed to be mobile to create or even to prevent something.”

During his career in civil construction, Gibb has held a number of general management and project-based roles in Australia and New Zealand — delivering major infrastructure projects,many of which were done through an intentional collaborative high-performance team. In 2013, he qualified as a civil engineer, was made a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers and appointed the 10th Brunel International lecturer. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Professional Engineers, New Zealand.

Gibb delivered a lecture based on a PowerPoint presentation, describing an internationally award-winning post-disaster collaborative recovery designed by engineers and organisational specialists to meet the massive horizontal infrastructure challenges created by a series of destructive earthquakes that struck Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2010 and 2011. The presentation was done to explain Scirt in what turned out to be a unique collaborative public-private partnership created to deliver the $2.5 (NZ) billion rebuild of the Christchurch publicly owned horizontal infrastructure (water, wastewater, drainage and roading) damaged by those earthquakes.

The organisation has since grown into a 2,000-strong team visible across the city of Christchurch involving more than 150 project sites and they work hard to keep the community directly affected by the works — and the travelling public informed and aware of the progress.

In New Zealand, whenever there is a disaster, civil engineers take control. Globally, the world comes in to help out. Gibb explained a few steps that would help to combat the problem. First, there is disaster; this leads to collaboration followed by a commercial agreement. Then there is a planned transition, a structure and then programme management. This gives rise to international development and, finally, to recovery from the situation.

Apparently, there are about 670 projects being delivered and managed by the engineering structure. The toughest challenge is to bring a lot of people under one roof and then work on the project, that too in stipulated time. He went on to explain the Scrit vision further, saying that “it is creating a resilient infrastructure that will give people security and confidence in the future of ChristChruch”.

He also proferred statistics from 2005-2015 —providing histories of various events. “No civil engineering group can function properly if there is no human interest angle. The impact of disaster is increasing in cities as more people are rushing to urban centres — increasing the state. The key to combat disaster is communication. The New Zealand ministry of foreign affairs is working with Indonesia so there is a model documentation to implement the plan and then systems and procedures are followed. The culture and leadership quality equally plays a role along with government (separating governance from management) – all resulting in recovery.”

There are vacation employment opportunities in this field and they do take a lot of Southeast Asian students, which is definitely good news for all.

Taranjit Singh, managing director of the JIS Group, said, “We are fortunate to have a civil engineer of the calibre of Mr Gibb speaking at our venue. Civil engineering is a field that has multilayered importance and is used in not only major construction projects but also transportation and infrastructure. His lecture will no doubt be relevant and meaningful to not just our civil engineering students but, indeed, to anyone who is interested in collaborative recovery models.” To be sure, this case history can be studied only as models here in India as the population of that of one state in relationship to that of Australia or New Zealand is twice as much. But there is no harm in learning, perhaps from what has been said earlier, when there is a disaster then the world comes in to help out.

Asked about civil engineers of those days, he said, “Back then safety was a problem, in fact it could be fatal. Not too many people would get into a field like this. Today, this discipline is more acceptable, even industrial workers come home safely. This apart, there is information at the fingertips of students these days, which was never the case in our time. Again, this field is no longer restricted to men. Around 33 per cent of women are part of this project and their involvement has toned things down, “given that men reason twice before making a move…(laughs). Sydney and Melbourne are getting multicultured and young culture is still growing. The reason why I came to this field is because I wanted to work outside”.