The manager of the CTV building said the six-storey structure "felt strong" after the 2010 earthquakes, a hearing was told today.
John Drew said he believed "we all had confidence" in the building after the magnitude-7.1 quake, contradicting a range of evidence already heard by the royal commission of inquiry hearing into the CTV building's collapse in the February 22 jolt.
Witnesses told the hearing last week that the building "shook" when trucks drove past and they raised their concerns with their bosses at work meetings.
But Mr Drew, speaking this morning on the fifth day of the hearing, said those fears were not conveyed to him.
The building manager said he was not present for the council safety inspections in the days after the initial magnitude-7.1 Christchurch earthquake on September 4, 2010.
He still told occupants inside the doomed Christchurch office block that it was safe to occupy because "engineers" had inspected it.
The Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission heard last week from three council workers who inspected the building after the September shake that they were not engineers.
The commission is investigating how the CTV building collapsed in the February 22 earthquake, killing 115 people.
Mr Drew said he told tenants that the building was safe as he was "relying entirely" on the green sticker placed on it.
Mr Frew then commissioned an independent report by a structural engineer and employed local firm CPG to carry it out.
He and structural engineer David Coatsworth spent a day going over the building and didn't believe there were any "structural integrity issues", but there was minor cosmetic damage.
Mr Coatsworth did ask the building manager to produce structural drawings as he did not possess "x-ray vision" and wanted to know more of how the concrete building was made.
Mr Drew struggled to produce the drawings, telling the hearing today that the council had warned him of an eight-week delay in accessing their records because they were in "disarray" after the shakes.
He believed the structural engineer had a "pretty good understanding" of the building, however, as when they walked around the building there was a lot of "nodding and tutting".
Mr Coatsworth eventually sourced the drawings from the building's maintenance manager.
City council inspectors have already given evidence on how they came to green-sticker the building and deem it safe to occupy after September.
It was assessed several times after the first magnitude-7.1 quake, which sparked the Canterbury earthquake sequence.
Workers inside the building told the hearing last week how they felt unsafe in it, in the months leading up to the disaster, and raised it repeatedly with their bosses.
Mr Drew today, however, said that while they spoke to a number of people as they went around, he could not recall them explaining how the building felt in the aftershocks which continued to rock the city.
One Kings Education occupant did say their floor had a "wave" in it, but Mr Coatsworth explained that it was "typical" of that kind of building and "was not concerned about it".
The hearing, which opened last Monday, has already heard some harrowing testimonials from survivors and witnesses.
It is scheduled to last eight weeks.
