Calls for private backers to save ‘missing’ City to Sea Bridge

Monday, 7 October 2024

Now you see it, now you don’t. A lobby group set up to save Wellington’s City to Sea bridge is calling on the wider arts community to get behind the cause after it’s online “demolition”.

The group, spearheaded by urban planner Stuart Niven, art historian Lesleigh Salinger and John Gray, one of the bridge’s architects, met with council staff last week to discuss saving the bridge as work on developing the Te Ngākau civic precinct gets under way.

“Basically we were told they couldn’t make any promises,” Salinger said. “But I did tell them they didn’t have a mandate to demolish it. I mean imagine if you were talking about one of the beautiful bridges in Paris … would you just go to the Parisians and say ‘oh, we’re going to take down that bridge’.”

The unique walkway, which links the city to the waterfront, is under threat of demolition following a seismic assessment of how it would stand up, or otherwise, in a 1-in-1000 year earthquake scenario.

The council had allocated $65m to investigate options for the bridge, the former Capital E building and the site’s basement. Those included remedial work and demolition.

Spokesperson Victoria Barton-Chapple said several assessments had been completed, but consultants were still working on “further design solutions for strengthening and the associated costs”.

The assessment would show the risk to the public, “and in this specific case, how the bridge behaves in an earthquake and what would be the impact on Jervois Quay which is a regional emergency transit route, and plays a critical role in emergency management after a major disaster”.

Consultation documents are expected to be made public towards the end of the month.

However, photographs of the redevelopment posted on social media show an artist’s impression of the finished civic square project minus the iconic bridge.

A council staffer said it was a view of “where the bridge is, showing the space, if it was demolished”.

The bridge is not considered a building under earthquake regulations, so cannot be formally labelled earthquake prone, but has been the subject of numerous reports on its safety since it opened in 1993.

In 2018 Spencer Holmes noted strengthening work undertaken in 2010-11 had included bracing to the bridge deck and concrete frames and reinforced concrete strengthening of the connection to the north abutment.

The engineers went on to say the completed works were specified to upgrade the bridge to an equivalent strength level of 40-50% of the seismic loadings standard at that time.

However, another assessment from 2023 ‒ which analysed the seismic rating under a 1-in-1000 year earthquake ‒ pointed out changes to the rationale for seismic assessments and revisions to seismic loading since the Spencer Holmes report meant that the seismic risk posed by the bridge, when assessed to modern standards, was actually unclear.

That report and a subsequent desktop review by engineering firm Beca raised additional concerns about potential liquefaction, particularly around the seawall that abuts the bridge, although it was also noted there had been no known evidence of ground damage at the site from either the 2016 Kaikōura (magnitude 7.8) 2013 Cook Strait (6.5) or 2013 Grassmere (6.6).

Salinger, who sees the bridge as a “living sculpture”, said it was ripe for some public sponsorship and called on the city’s “artists, architects, sculptors and arts philanthropists” to help save it from destruction.

“Sadly, this really all comes back to years of neglect and councils not maintaining their assets,” she said.