To mark the 10th anniversary of the first earthquake on 4 September 2010, South Brighton Residents’ Association[1], in collaboration with Empowered Christchurch Incorporated, has compiled a timeline of the key events and developments
over the period. You can view the timeline here: http://empoweredchristchurch.co.nz/timeline/
Empowered Christchurch and the South Brighton Residents’ Association have been lobbying the authorities responsible
since 2012 in attempts to obtain transparency and a commitment to mitigate the hazards that resulted from the
earthquakes. Our experience was that, in response, legal obligations were ignored or circumvented, technical information
and reports withheld, and responsibility for addressing earthquake issues was deferred and repeatedly passed on from one
entity to another. Earthquake legacy problems are now being conflated with climate change. Below are just some examples
of the plethora of documents and studies that were produced without any actual mitigation of the identified hazards:
- 2012: The Land Drainage Recovery Programme (LDRP) was established by Christchurch City Council
- 2015 (July): a pre-feasibility study for a tidal barrier was carried out to mitigate the flood risk in the lower River
Avon. This solution was rejected by Christchurch City Council as too expensive on 29 October 2015
- 2015: Tonkin & Taylor Stage 2 Coastal Hazard Assessment
- 2016: A Tonkin & Taylor Coastal Hazard report was published, with a peer review in 2017. In the original report, 6,000 properties were
identified as being exposed to erosion. This number was reduced to 1,000 after the peer review. A later OIA response
stated that responsibility for the omitted hazards of land damage and ground water lay with the EQC.
- A sea wall was mentioned in the T 2017 peer review, which then reappeared as a flood wall or estuary barrage in a Regenerate Christchurch publication (Otakaro Avon River Corridor Regeneration Plan, Revised Version May 2018)
These are only some of the many administrative delays from the commissioning of reports, revisions, assessments and peer
reviews. Many more are chronicled in the above-mentioned timeline.
Responsibility for developing solutions for the earthquake issues in the eastern suburbs has been variously held by the
Christchurch City Council, Regenerate Christchurch, a dedicated council unit, the “How Team”, and the “Coastal Futures”
team.
In July 2018, the Christchurch City Council was labelled the most secretive in New Zealand. And in a report released at
the end of last year, the Ombudsman described a culture of “secrecy, deception and cover-ups” at the Christchurch City
Council. This related to council policy when responding to LGOIMA (Local Government Official Information and Meetings
Act) requests, but in our experience, it is also a reasonably accurate description of the council’s approach to
releasing information on earthquake damage and explaining how it intends to address coastal hazards.
Despite the fact that local authorities are required to give effect to the New Zealand Coastal Policy Statement (NZCPS)
2010 in their policies, plans and selection of methods, there is no indication of Christchurch City Council having made
any serious effort to do so over the last decade, and specifically to Policies 24-28[2] inclusive.
Despite the serious damage caused by the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence in the city’s eastern suburbs, there is still no
3 Waters (drinking water, wastewater and storm water) report for example, or a Flood Management Plan for the South
Brighton area.
Despite earthquake-induced land subsidence of up to 1.0 m in the lower Avon Estuary, the council has made vigorous
efforts to attribute the resulting risks to climate change and rising sea levels. And despite the council taking over
responsibility from Regenerate Christchurch in mid-2019 for what it described as “earthquake legacy issues” in South New
Brighton, establishing a dedicated council unit, and undertaking to reassess the risk to life from the failure of an
emergency stop bank in the area, a further year has passed with no action having been taken.
The government recently pledged to reorganize the Earthquake Commission to ensure that no other New Zealanders have to
go through the experiences of Cantabrians after 2010. But thanks to the restricted scope of the EQC Inquiry, the crucial
subject of earthquake-induced land damage is still to be addressed. It is this serious land subsidence resulting from
the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence and the failure on the part of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA),
the EQC and the City Council to deal with the resulting risks that have placed many residential properties in the lower
Avon estuary at substantially increased risk of tidal inundation. We call upon the New Zealand Government and the
Christchurch City Council to finally acknowledge these facts and to meet their responsibilities towards residents in the
affected areas before a further decade has passed.
[1] South New Brighton was one of the areas in Christchurch worst affected by the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence (CES)
[2] Policy 24: Identification of coastal hazards; Policy 25: Subdivision, use and development in areas of costal hazard
risk; Policy 26: Natural defences against coastal hazards; Policy 27: Strategies for protecting significant existing
development from coastal hazard risk, and Policy 28: Monitoring and reviewing the effectiveness of the NZCPS