A critical eye on earthquake strengthening

The Government, and therefore the long suffering taxpayers, are being inundated with a whole bunch of major problems at the moment.

I just wonder if the primates that the Government appears to look to for advice have bothered to refresh their maths skills. Sadly, it appears they haven’t.

While everybody has their attention grabbed by the current climate driven events and the new ‘‘policy’’ just laid out by our intrepid muppets down there in Fort Bumble, nobody seems to have noticed the ongoing drain of scarce funds that are going into shoring up ‘‘earthquake prone’’ buildings.

A million here, ten million there, a hundred million there and even more where ‘‘health and safety’’ are an apparent issue.

The maths suggest that Auckland may have a volcano at some time with associated earthquake-like shaking, Wellington is due for a big one, and any and all parts of the shaky isles may actually shake when the pressure of the plates proves too much.

Well, the lifespan of buildings in NZ are generally measured in decades with some of the better ones, usually made of decent wood, maybe a century or more.

Earthquakes and volcano activity is usually measured in millenia, (a thousand years) or even hundreds of millenia.

Why on earth are we destroying our heritage buildings at great cost when they have a very good chance of being useful and standing until they are ready to be euthanised.

On the other hand we are still talking about ‘‘managed retreat’’ from climatic events in terms of 40 years in the future.

My prediction is that you will be lucky, very lucky, to have even five years before thinking about the problem of managed retreat becomes an imperative that you are simply not ready for having drained the coffers strengthening buildings that were quite adequate.

Geoff Orchard, Ohaupo