Wellington earthquake recovery plans.

After the Christchurch earthquake, New Zealand seems to have had a knee jerk reaction. They are now inspecting every building in the country and marking many for demolition, worried that they  may not withstand a really severe earthquake.

  

Of course, when you have been through of few of these earthquakes you know how scary they are. I find them very frightening. You never know when an earthquake will come and how long it will last and how big it will be. It is one of the things you have no control or power over.

Most of the buildings in New Zealand are built to withstand earthquakes. I worked in a nine floor building in the CBD and had two 6.3 quakes while I was there. The building is on huge rubber rollers so swayed with the movement. There was no damage and nothing fell even though the whole place was doing the cha cha.

The whole of New Zealand is earthquake prone, although Auckland and north Auckland get few of them, however in the last couple of weeks Auckland did get a couple of shakes.  The main concern is Wellington. By all accounts it is overdue for a whopper, either sometime within the next fifty years or five hundred…who knows? Wellington is a city built on steep hills, surrounding a harbour, and I don’t know how much chance there is of a tsunami because of the narrow opening of the harbour, but the steep hills could easily slip along with many of the houses.  Access also is tricky with most of the main roads out to the outer suburbs along the foreshore with hills on the other side.

One road from the Kapiti Coast over to Lower Hutt is the Paekakariki Hill Road. Here is a video of a motorbike ride to the top. Notice how high the top of the hill is. You can see the beach below. 

There are so many people who commute into the city from outside the main city basin. Commuter trains go all the time, and to get through the hills there is a 5 km tunnel, a place not to be caught during a big quake.

All the access roads are through the hills and around the northern sea shore around Plimmerton up to Kapiti Coast. In a decent earthquake it is expected that all those roads would be impassable.

To get access in case of an earthquake will cost a fortune.  There has been a motor way proposed through an area called Transmission Gully, but no government seems to want to spend the money to get it going.

Peter found this article about a new plan Wellington is putting together in case of a large earthquake. They are obviously putting things in place.