APC Racking vs 2010 Christchurch Earthquake

At 4:35am on a Saturday in September 2010, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake hit Christchurch.

Most of the city was asleep.

Up to 40 major warehouse racking collapses. The city's two biggest food distribution warehouses - gone. Within days, Christchurch was staring down the barrel of a food shortage. They ran out of landfill in three days just trying to deal with the wreckage.

And in the middle of all of that chaos?

Our racking was still standing.

Not just the radio shuttle racking - which is inherently more tied together and stable - but the selective racking too.

Here's what makes that genuinely hard to believe:

The Selective Racking had pallets in that freezer that were double-stacked. 1.5 tonnes each. Sitting on rails 2.7 metres off the ground with nothing below them but air and a lot of potential movement and energy.

When the ground starts moving, that load is a pendulum. A very heavy, very angry pendulum.

And it didn't come down.

Meanwhile, across Christchurch, warehouses that had established & brand new racking suffered catastrophic failures and were being ripped out with excavator grabbers and bulldozed into skips.

Earthquakes are unpredictable and the engineering gets complicated fast.

But here's what we know for certain:

✅ Our racking went in during 2008–2009.

✅ A magnitude 7.1 earthquake hit in September 2010.

✅ The racking was still standing afterwards.

✅ Heinz Watties kept operating when most of their competitors couldn't.

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can say is just that the APC racking systems withstood all the earthquakes and is still standing today.

Built to last isn't just a tagline. Apparently, it's also earthquake-tested.