Gisborne in ‘high seismicity’ category

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GISBORNE has been placed in the high seismicity zone in new earthquake legislation but the decision means that owners of earthquake-prone buildings here have five more years to bring them up to standard, the District Council environmental planning and regulations committee was told.

The council’s chief building specialist Ian Petty said the legislation controlling the assessment and upgrading of earthquake-prone buildings was in its final stages before the house and might be passed before the end of the year.

But the regulations that would outline the definition of earthquake-prone buildings and the transitional provisions might take up to 18 months to finalise.

Originally it was intended to have a one-size-fits-all approach to the new legislation but after the select submissions process it was changed to an upgrading system based on an area’s seismicity.

Gisborne was in the high seismicity zone and the current proposal was that building owners would have 15 years to remove any danger posed by an earthquake-prone building. Gisborne’s time frame was 10 years from the issue of a notice.

Parapets on city buildingsCommittee chairwoman Pat Seymour asked how this would affect the dangerous parapets on city buildings. In the 2007 earthquake these had caused the most damage and it was lucky no one was killed.

Mr Petty said this would have to be dealt with by other means and as well as about six buildings with parapets, there was a reasonable number of buildings that were due to be finished by 2018. Some of these buildings had notices on them since 1993, so they had been given a lot of time.

Larry Foster asked what was to stop an investor with an earthquake-prone building deciding to put apartments into those buildings.

Mr Petty said apartments were covered by a separate section of the act that said where people wanted to put them in they would be covered by the whole fire, access for disabilities and strengthening requirements and that would make it very difficult, if not impossible, to make the changes.

The big cost would be the structural upgrade.

Craig Bauld said there were large numbers of people who thought it would be easy but it was not.

Alan Davidson said if it was too costly, the buildings might remain empty permanently.

Mr Petty said some developers were looking at commercial space upstairs. When a building was already strengthened, it was not a huge cost, but apartments were costly.