Quake-safety policy better fit

Catch up with Ian McKelvie after the Rangitikei election results. Stock

WORKING out a sensible and balanced approach for regulating the earthquake risk of older buildings throughout New Zealand is complicated.

If we are too soft, we may risk the lives of New Zealanders whenever the next major event occurs. If we're too tough, then we will gut dozens of country towns, lose hundreds of heritage buildings and impose huge costs on farmers, businesses and communities.

The Government is in the process of revising its policy on managing earthquake risk by better targeting regulations to focus on buildings where location, use and type pose the greatest risk to life.

Last week, Minister for Building and Housing Nick Smith announced that the priority for developing the new earthquake-strengthening policy was public safety and minimising future fatalities. According to Dr Smith, we also need to ensure the response is proportionate to the risk, that the costs are minimised and that we retain as much of our built heritage as possible.

Essentially there have been four substantial changes to the existing policy, including varying the timetable for strengthening relative to the earthquake risk; prioritising education and emergency buildings for strengthening; reducing the number of buildings requiring assessment; and introducing new measures to encourage earlier upgrades.

The timeframe for identification and assessment of five years and strengthening of 15 years is to be varied relative to the actual seismic risk. The return period for a severe earthquake (MM8) ranges from 120 years in Wellington, to 720 years in Christchurch, 1700 years in Dunedin, and only once every 7400 years in Auckland.

Consequently, New Zealand is to be categorised into low, medium and high seismic risk zones with timeframes for assessment of five, 10 and 15 years and strengthening of 15, 25 and 35 years respectively.

Education and emergency buildings will be targeted by requiring that in high and medium seismic risk areas they be identified and strengthened in half the standard time. We are prioritising all education buildings regularly occupied by 20 people or more, and we also want to ensure buildings like hospitals can maintain services in the aftermath of a major earthquake.

Reducing the scope of the buildings requiring assessment from an estimated 500,000 to 30,000 is another important change to the policy and one that will make a difference to rural New Zealand.

The current policy excludes over 1.3 million stand-alone homes but it includes 260,000 farm buildings. It really does not make sense when a hay-shed that you might spend an hour a week in requires an earthquake risk assessment, but the farmhouse you and your family live in day and night doesn't.

Under the new system we are excluding farm buildings, retaining walls, fences, monuments, wharves, bridges, tunnels and storage tanks.

The effect of these policy changes is that buildings such as schools, universities and hospitals in high and medium seismic risk areas will have to be upgraded more quickly. But the overall effect of this more targeted approach will reduce the estimated cost from $1360 million to $777 million, while retaining the safety gains.

There are no easy answers to the seismic risk posed by thousands of older buildings in New Zealand.

We cannot completely eliminate the risk to life, or save every heritage building, or avoid a bill for hundreds of millions in upgrading. But this policy strikes the right balance between safety, cost, heritage and practicality - and it's a much better fit for rural and provincial New Zealand.