Natural hazards and land damage

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What to expect from Council's natural hazards/land damage work

Since the earthquake we’ve been working with the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management, EQC, Environment Canterbury, geologists and scientists to support landowners to work through their natural hazard and land damage issues and to plan for future land use.

An estimated 100 properties across our District face elevated risks caused by land damage and natural hazard activity triggered by the November 14 206 earthquake.

We’ve been working one-on-one with affected property owners to keep them up to date and help them understand what happens next.

We expect:

You can expect:

What the EQ did to our land and natural hazards

The November 2016 earthquake exposed a large number of known and new natural hazards such as landslips, rock-fall, and landslide dams.  It also caused significant damage to land under and around people’s homes, businesses and farms such as cracking, lateral spread, and liquefaction.

These natural hazards and land damage affected an estimated 100 properties across our District.  This number is properties with risks/damage related to natural hazards and land damage only, it doesn’t include properties with only structural damage.

As part of the immediate earthquake response, ‘quick’ visual assessments of all properties District wide were completed. Properties that were structurally damaged or were at risk from hazards (e.g. landslide or rockfall) were issued with placards (‘stickers’). In the response phase of the emergency, Kaikoura District Council issued 289 red or yellow placards.

As we moved into recovery we checked over 180 properties to see if further geotechnical assessments were needed. 65 properties received more detailed geotechnical reports. We now know:

We’re working with central government and others to work out what happens next for these properties – read on for more information. 

For all other properties, although the level of risk to a property may have changed since the earthquake, the level is not high enough to prevent occupation. This means property owners can work with their insurers, engineers, geotechs, builders and Council to complete whatever repairs are needed.

We’re here to help throughout this process – try the ‘useful links’ section at the bottom of this page for places to start.

The decision making process

To keep our decisions about the properties affected by elevated risk from land damage/natural hazards responsible, affordable and fair, Council needed to consider what it wanted to achieve (our objectives) and who it would apply to (our intervention criteria) and how we’d be getting involved (our intervention options).

Our objectives are to:

Our intervention criteria:

Our intervention criteria help guide Councils work around natural hazards and land damage. Every property we know about with land damage/natural hazard risk is checked against these criteria. If it meets one or more, Council considers intervention options for that property.

There are three different types of intervention criteria:

Our intervention options:

To keep people safe while we find long term solutions, Section 124 notices have been issued for buildings with unacceptably high life risk from natural hazards/land damage. This means these buildings are considered dangerous and cannot be used until the notice is lifted. Read more about Section 124s.

Longer term, interventions options range from fixing or reducing the risk/damage to moving people away from the risk if there is no other viable solution. 

For each property, we need to decide what scale of intervention is appropriate and where funding can be found. Costs will vary and are likely to be split between property owners (eg, through their insurance payouts), the Council, and central government.

Council is currently developing a business case that will go to central government, outlining our recommendations about these costs.

A decision on the business case is expected in 2018.

Keeping people safe and supported

If your ability to live in our use your property has been affected, we recommend you contact the following agencies and seek their advice and support:

If you have received a notice and you do not agree with our assessment or you have now completed the required work, please contact our building team to schedule a reassessment

Useful links

Background

Since the earthquake, Council has been building a good range of information to inform decisions. This includes a significant amount of geotechnical data including reports on subsurface testing, observed lateral spread and land stretching, aerial photography and ground elevations (eg. LiDAR), geotechnical surveys and building and infrastructure damage data.

Council has also been working with central government (the National Recovery Office within the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Department of Internal Affairs, the Department of Conservation, the Ministry of Primary Industries, the Ministry of Building, Innovation and Employment, and the Ministry for the Environment), and other agencies including ECAN, neighbouring councils, GNS Science, NCTIR to share information and reduce costs.

Natural hazards and land damage can pose risks to people’s lives, safety, health and wellbeing.  They can reduce the value of people’s homes and land.  This can impact on whether people can afford to rebuild or to carry on using their land and property in the way they did prior to the earthquake.

Councils are normally responsible for managing and mitigating risks from natural hazards and land damage. However, during recovery, central government agencies support Councils to keep people safe; and to identify and implement options for managing and mitigating risks.

There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach for how hazards and risks should be identified or managed. Each case is assessed on its merits. Risk management options range from accepting a risk, to avoiding it altogether (eg, by prohibiting access to, or use of, an area).

The main focus is on protecting the ‘life safety’ of people and communities; and then identifying long-term measures to reduce risks.  These measures can include geotechnical solutions (e.g rock-fall nets, bunds and walls; monitoring systems to provide early warning of future risks); or policy measures (such as restricting access or development of ‘at-risk’ sites).