Shaky regulations in the Shaky Isles

There's a 20 per cent chance of a major earthquake on the South Island alpine fault in the next two decades, according to Civil Defence modelling, writes The Southland Times in an editorial.

It's a warning that was underlined this week when speakers from the New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering highlighted characteristics shared by the Southern Lakes and the stricken south-central China province of Wenchuan.

On matters geographical, geological and tectonic the engineers' comparisons are to be accepted, notably how damaging landslides had been. That is no small thing given that more than 88,000 people were killed or went missing and about 370,000 people were injured.

However, enormous social and regulatory differences can scarcely be disregarded. Quite apart from huge population differences there's the small matter of jerrybuilding.

One of the scandals of the Wenchuan disaster was how many deaths were caused not by calamitous landslides but to an abject failure to maintain building standards.

If we are to seek lessons from Wenchuan then none should be more striking than the need to be absolutely sure our structures afford reasonable protection, in striking contrast to the Chinese indulgence of concrete buildings with the structural quality of a house of cards.

This is not a given. Concerns about the adequacy of approvals in the Queenstown area have arisen from a Building and Housing Department technical review, which found oversights from CivicCorp (now Lakes Environment) from 1998-2007. The problem, apparently widespread among councils, came from relying on producer statements instead of an independent peer review. Among the findings CivicCorp had no mechanisms for identifying earthquake-prone buildings.

To be fair, it has been a turbulent time. Much has changed since the mid-1980s when more than half of the Institution of Professional Engineers worked for local or central government and the Works Ministry was a mighty beast. The ministry was broken up, and local councils separated design engineers from those who checked external building consents, and pretty soon found themselves losing engineering expertise.

Developers keen to get a building up as quickly and cheaply as possible were given, in hindsight, too much rein. On-site engineering inspection became a much-less rigorous hurdle and discomforting reports arose of precast concrete panels too thin for their height.

The Building Act was updated in 2004 with more emphasis on technical reviews and requiring local authorities to become accredited against the new regulations.

The act also required councils to come up with a quake-prone buildings policy, though the earthquake engineers society found many of these quite passive unless or until changes were made to a building. (Invercargill residents will recognise this as The Scottish Hall syndrome.)

In any case the act has been heavily criticised as overly bureaucratic and the present Government plans to reform it to streamline procedures.

That's fine to the extent it may lead to greater efficiency and reduce needless expense, delay and heartache.

But standards need to be upheld and the leaky buildings fiasco is but one indication of how poorly New Zealand is capable of doing in that respect.

What we really don't want, though, is an earthquake to find us out.

- © Fairfax NZ News