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Earthquake strengthening: human cost versus monetary cost

Saturday, 25 November 2023

Professor Ann Brower survived being crushed by falling masonry when the bus she was in was hit in the February 2011 quake.
Professor Ann Brower survived being crushed by falling masonry when the bus she was in was hit in the February 2011 quake.

Ann Brower knows the true cost of failing to fix dangerous buildings.

In 2011, the university professor was severely injured when falling masonry from a central city building crushed the bus she was travelling on during the Christchurch earthquake.

Twelve people on the bus or walking nearby were killed. Brower was the only survivor.

After a long and arduous recovery she became a reluctant crusader for improvements to New Zealand’s earthquake-prone building laws, which were eventually improved in 2016.

With councils and private building owners across the country now facing upgrades totalling billions of dollars, the minister in charge of pushing those laws through – former National MP-turned-Nelson mayor Nick Smith – now admits they should be “tweaked” again.

Brower also believes the Government needs to further tighten its focus on what gets fixed.

“It’s important not to forget the human costs, but it’s also important to do it in an efficient way. I’m not convinced the way we are doing it now is efficient, or even effective.”

One of the reasons it was so hard for people to take action was because the costs and benefits affected different entities, Brower said.

“The benefits of leaving a building standing until it collapses on people are private – but the costs are borne by the public. So the public is subsidising leaving a building standing until it collapses.”

It cost more than $500,000 to treat her injuries and the Government sets the value of a life at many millions.

“Those who benefit are going to lobby really hard to maintain their benefits, those who bear the cost, don’t even know they’re bearing that cost.”

After being seismically assessed by engineers, owners needed to fix their buildings to a rating above 34% of the new building standard (NBS).

Brower said making the NBS percentage the focus of remediation efforts may “not be the best way to go”.

“It’s not so much about the health costs versus the fixing it up costs. It’s about the point at which you have to fix it up. I don’t think the NBS is the best way to measure that risk.

“The percentage of the building standard doesn’t really tell you the likelihood of something falling off or the whole thing collapsing.

“A building could fail because of an unattached chimney. Well, fix the bloody chimney, you don’t have to bring the whole building up to a really high standard, you just need to fix the ‘fally-offy’ bits.”

The Post reported recently that several engineers and architects were also questioning whether the current method of using NBS thresholds to assess safety risk was the best way.

Nelson Mayor Nick Smith was at the coalface of creating legislation that councils are now grappling with.
Nelson Mayor Nick Smith was at the coalface of creating legislation that councils are now grappling with.

Wellington City Council has 572 earthquake-prone buildings within its confines and councillors are warning a crisis was looming as hundreds of strengthening deadlines were due to expire in the next four years.

No-one is more familiar with the burden placed on building owners and local government than Nick Smith.

As minister of building and housing for a National-led government in 2016, Smith oversaw new legislation to make sure buildings were fixed within appropriate time frames depending on the earthquake risk of respective regions.

“The issue is a nightmare because [of] the tension between the huge costs, the pressures on councils and building owners, as well as the very unpredictable, but horrific, risk that is attempting to be managed.”

Wellington Town Hall’s earthquake strengthening bill has ballooned astronomically.
Wellington Town Hall’s earthquake strengthening bill has ballooned astronomically.

“The 2016 legislation that I was responsible for did its best to try and strike that balance.”

Smith said as everyone grappled with the standards, they have learned about more efficient ways to fix problems and the Government could reconsider how the system operated.

“Wellington is at the sharp end of implementing this legislation.

“It would be worthwhile having a fresh look at how the implementation is going … to help inform the national roll-out of these earthquake prone building provisions.

“Lots of communities, engineers, councils and building owners have a lot more experience now than they did almost eight years ago.

”It’s not until you get into the practical reality of dealing with these hundreds of buildings that you start getting a real sense of what the most efficient regulatory tool is.

“I would be quite open to Government initiating a review and further tweaking the law.”

Smith said whatever happened, there was no easy solution.

“There is going to be cost, there are going to be buildings that need to come down, and we’re not going to completely eliminate the risk.

“I could see a good argument for review as long as it doesn’t create an expectation that this problem’s going away and can be ignored,” he said.

Councillor Iona Pannett said Wellington’s earthquake prone building problem is a looming crisis.
Councillor Iona Pannett said Wellington’s earthquake prone building problem is a looming crisis.

“We would be derelict in our duties to the 185 people who lost their lives in Christchurch if we did not keep our eye on the ball of making our building stock safer for whenever the next big quake hits.”

National MP Chris Bishop, a resident of Lower Hutt, said it was inappropriate to comment as, when he spoke to The Post, the new government had not yet been sworn in.

The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment planned to “comprehensively review the earthquake prone building system” every 10 years and the next review was due in 2027.

Wellington City councillor Iona Pannett was advocating the new government reviewed the system and possibly extend deadlines where appropriate so that it could consider new funding models.

“The Government needs to go away and do more analysis. They went in with this enormous tool to force people to strengthen though the Act without understanding how much it would cost.”

By the numbers

*In 2012 MBIE commissioned a cost benefit analysis showing estimates of how many lives would be saved by the EPB system with strengthening at different levels. It modelled expected fatalities where an earthquake (measuring 11 on the Modified Mercalli scale) happened on a working day comparing non-strengthened cities to 34% NBS strengthened cities.