Robert Davey

Robert Davey's earthquake-engineering career includes leadership roles in the Ministry of Works and Development, Works Consultancy and Opus International Consultants. His work has covered structural assessment, earthquake-loss estimation and lifelines planning, including Wellington assessments in the early 1990s and the Canterbury earthquake recovery. He received Engineering New Zealand's Freyssinet Award in 2015 and became a fellow of the New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering in 2021.

The 2005 earthquake-risk report prepared for Environment Canterbury by P. Brabhaharan, Robert Davey, Francis O’Riley and Leonard Wiles documents a difficult exchange of network information. Telecom kept Christchurch assets in Smallworld GIS and restricted release of its complete underground cable network. Earlier studies had received incomplete CAD extracts, and by 2005 the report described the loss of the earlier in-house drafting capability. Smallworld could translate layers and attributes, but producing a disconnected selection from the network remained difficult.