The Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Act 2016 came into force on July 1, 2017

This amendment introduced a wide range of new provisions for the management of earthquake prone buildings in New Zealand, including the need for Council’s to identify and in some cases require engineering assessments for potentially earthquake prone buildings.

Because Dunedin is in a low seismic zone the Building Act provides a 15 year period (effective 1 July 2017) for the Council to identify potentially earthquake prone buildings.

Given the additional resources required to manage this legislative change, we have recently appointed Peter Brookland to the Compliance Officer (Earthquake-prone Building) role. Peter, who is currently one of our building consent processing officers, brings a wealth of knowledge and architectural design experience to this role. Initially Peter's time will be spent developing processes and it is anticipated that profiling work will commence after 1 October 2019. 

In the interim seismic assessments can still be submitted to the DCC by emailing earthquakepronebuildings@dcc.govt.nz, however, it is unlikely these will be assessed until after 1 October 2019.

All seismic assessments must be done in accordance with the current methodology set out in the regulations. This may mean any older seismic reports submitted to the DCC (under previous legislation) may not have been produced in accordance with the current methodology. If you are in any level of doubt we suggest you talk to your structural engineer. It is envisaged these older seismic reports will eventually go through a profiling process after 1 October. The building owners will be contacted once the process has been determined.

Note a fee will be charged for assessing and determining a buildings earthquake prone status.  

More information can be found on our website.