Seismic Assessment

Hugh Paveltich emails:

The “seismic assessment” fiasco is just more of the same … political and bureaucratic failure on a massive scale.

This writer is still going through this experience, that started back in early 2012, when a 20 years of age 5 unit standard retail development require a seismic assessment by a corporate tenant.

The initial high quality assessment rating was 56%. It was expected the full assessment would rate higher.

Regrettably the initial skilled assessor was so swamped with work, this writer allowed a corporate tenant to proceed with a follow-up full assessment by an Auckland based engineer, who came back with a result of 0 – 5%.

Following repeated requests by this writer, the local authority and other engineers, the full report with calculations has yet to be provided.

That’s when all hell broke loose.

The corporate tenants panicked (with many losing their jobs subsequently … a story that has yet to be told) … exiting the premises immediately … at substantial and unnecessary costs to themselves and others. The owner only learned of this the day they were exiting.

There was clearly a massive mess to sort out.

This was followed by desktop assessments of 28%; 32% and 67% by the 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th firms of engineers. Generally, older engineers did not perform well.

Remarkably, a 2 level structure nearby, developed at the same time and assessed  by the 6^th engineering firm, came out with an NBS rating of 99%.

The inconsistencies did not however stop at the ratings. The proposed solutions were all over the place as well.

I wonder how processes that yield such divergent assessments can produce a percent-of-NBS measure forming the basis for regulatory mandates. Update: See also Rodney Hide's column in this weekend's NBR ($).

Meanwhile, EQC troubles continue. Great that 3D is continuing to air this kind of stuff, despite apparent fatigue with it elsewhere in the country.