Kaikōura Earthquake Recovery

At 12:02am on 14 November 2016, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck near Culverden in North Canterbury. The rupture involved more than 25 separate faults over roughly 180 km, several of them not previously mapped, making it one of the most complex earthquake ruptures recorded in New Zealand. The ground did not just shake. In places, it displaced by several metres across a whole region.

Unlike the 2010 to 2011 Canterbury earthquakes, the Kaikōura event spread damage across remote rural land, coastal communities and nationally important transport corridors. More than 10,000 landslides were triggered, with some large enough to bury sections of State Highway 1 and the railway line either side of Kaikōura, cutting off the town and disrupting the South Island’s main transport route.

Lateral spreading caused severe damage near Lyell Creek, liquefaction affected low-lying rural land across Kaikōura, Marlborough and Wellington, and buildings were damaged as far away as the capital. More than 45,000 insurance claims followed.

Recovery from this earthquake meant covering ground, literally. Cook Costello mobilised a large geotechnical and structural team to assess damage across Hurunui, Kaikōura, Marlborough, Tasman and Nelson, a footprint far larger than a single-city response. Our work included:

• Assessing more than 500 residential properties across five districts for insurers, claim providers and private owners

• Carrying out structural damage assessments and designing repair or strengthening works for dozens of commercial and industrial buildings

• Delivering hundreds of geotechnical and structural reports to help progress insurance claims

• Providing practical recommendations for land remediation and building repairs on sites where the ground itself had shifted

This large-scale, time-critical response demonstrated Cook Costello’s ability to mobilise quickly, assess complex land and building damage across a wide region, and provide engineering advice during one of New Zealand’s major natural hazard recovery programmes.