Wall Louisa: Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWall Louisa: Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:10067. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]LOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Kia ora Mr Chair. Thank you very much for the opportunity to contribute to the Committee stage debate on the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill. Firstly I want to acknowledge that this bill stemmed from recommendations made by the Canterbury earthquakes royal commission in volume 4 of its final report which was released by the Government in December 2012. The recommendations focused on the legislation policies and practices underpinning New Zealand’s approach to earthquake-prone buildings in the wake of the Canterbury earthquakes.I specifically do want to focus most of my contribution on Supplementary Order Paper 152 by David Seymour and his wanting to add after new section 133AA(1)(k) in clause 23: “(l) a building located in an area of low seismic risk.” It is relevant for my electorate because the examples used are Auckland Northland and Dunedin. So as an MP based in South Auckland obviously it is highly relevant to my community.One of the things you do when you are given an opportunity to speak on a bill that is actually incredibly technical—I want to take the opportunity to also congratulate the Local Government and Environment Committee on going through a process of being able to present a piece of legislation to the House that fulfils those recommendations of the royal commission because I can see that it was a highly technical bill. The next piece of information I am going to share is actually highly technical as well.What I did was find a GNS Science report that was presented to the senior hazards adviser of Auckland Council and it is titled “Benefits of strengthening earthquake-prone buildings in Auckland” and is dated 18 February 2014. The interesting thing about this piece of evidence as I will call it that is relevant is that what it went through was an exercise of identifying all the deficient buildings in Auckland. Believe it or not there are 526000 buildings in Auckland and what it found was that there were 9794 buildings that were deficient. What it then went through was a process of modelling that asked if we were to look at—and this is where it becomes really interesting—earthquakes in a 200000-year-long synthetic catalogue of earthquakes and if we were to look at buildings that were not strengthened and then if we were to actually strengthen these 9794 buildings what would the impact be?I am going to read it out because it is actually incredibly fascinating. What it essentially says is that for the buildings that have not been brought up to standard I suppose every 10000 years there is a probability or a chance of a severe earthquake that is 0.0001 percent and within that category there would be 107 deaths there would be one critical injury there would be 71 serious injuries and there would be 922 moderate injuries. The other interesting statistic is that in fact of those 526000 buildings 87755—or 17 percent of the total buildings—would be affected. So at the high end of the spectrum 107 people would die.At the low end of the spectrum the probability of an earthquake every 200 years is 0.005. There would be two deaths zero critical injuries four serious injuries and 61 moderate injuries and 12663—or 2.4 percent—of the buildings would be affected. These are buildings where for those 9794 buildings we did nothing to them—so we did not do anything.Here is where it gets really interesting because the next modelling is OK if we made all those deficient buildings sound and these are the statistics. For the most severe—so a 0.0001 percent chance every 10000 years—there would be 104 deaths so it is actually only a reduction of three deaths. There would be one critical injury there would be 69 serious injuries—a reduction of two—and there would be 890 moderate injuries which is a reduction of 32. At the low end of the spectrum where a person might die—0.005 percent probability every 200 years—there would be two deaths there would be zero critical injuries there would be four serious injuries and there would be 60 moderate injuries which is a reduction of one in moderate injuries.So I think that when you look at those statistics it is interesting. I actually think David Seymour has brought an incredibly important issue to the table and his Supplementary Order Paper therefore based on this evidence should be supported but with one caveat. It is a caveat in the report itself which says that there are some shortcomings in terms of the modelling. This in fact reinforces what my colleague David Parker said. It was very hard to estimate casualties arising from the fall of wet brick chimneys architectural ornaments and unbraced parapets. Although overall the results of this particular piece of research say that the earthquake risk in Auckland is small and that the benefits of upgrading earthquake-prone buildings to a minimum of 33 percent of the new building standard are very small it also must be remembered that the earthquake risk in Auckland is not zero and that these chimneys architectural ornaments and unbraced parapets should be classified as dangerous. I guess that is the lesson from Canterbury. As my colleague Poto Williams says maybe there is some merit in actually doing something about those items on some of our buildings.My contribution really is in support of David Seymour’s Supplementary Order Paper. It is going to be interesting to see how it is voted on throughout the evening but I have really appreciated the opportunity to do a bit more investigation into this piece of legislation. It is a very serious issue. I have lots of aroha for the people of Christchurch but obviously this piece of legislation is relevant to everybody and so the contribution that I have made hopefully will provide some relevance to the people of Tāmaki-makau-rau. Kia ora.