From there the work became a staged rebuild, carried out block by block around a campus that was teaching again. RCP sequenced it so the spaces hardest to replace, nursing, veterinary nursing, engineering and viticulture, came back first, keeping disruption to students and staff as low as possible while construction went on around them.
The recovery has grown from straight reinstatement into something more, lifting the campus to modern standards and weaving Māori and Pacific design and kaumātua-led input through the work. One of the clearest results is Te Kahikatea, a nursing clinical simulation suite created in the seismically upgraded Bruce Martin building, giving Hawke's Bay's future nurses realistic ward and clinic training and bringing the School of Nursing back together on campus.
