Question: What Brings You to New Zealand?

INTERVIEW

Sir Maarten Wevers: We’ve just reached the end of a really successful two-day forum, convened by BRANZ, MBIE and EQC, to look at extracting the lessons from the Canterbury earthquake events, and what they mean for the rest of New Zealand. We’re trying to determine what the lessons are that we can use to make New Zealand a more resilient place.

One of the fantastic keynote speakers we had from overseas was Dr Lucy Jones, who has most recently been serving as a Special Advisor to the Mayor of Los Angeles. I’d really like to introduce her now, because her contribution to kick off the forum was just outstanding.

Question: What brings you to New Zealand?

Dr Lucy Jones: I’ve been in Wellington for the last couple of days participating in the Built Environment Leaders’ Forum. I’ve been asked to give my experience in California at bringing science together with policy makers to look at how we can be best prepared for earthquakes.

Question: Can New Zealand learn from the Californian earthquake experiences?

I look at the Christchurch earthquake and compare it to the other earthquakes I’ve seen in California, China, Japan, elsewhere. I see several things that are very admirable. I also see places where, unsurprisingly, there’s more to be done. I’m impressed at the community resilience. I’m really impressed with the way people are working with each other and collaborating, because in the end, the earthquake’s really about that long recovery period, and the long-term disruption to your lives.

One thing, though, that surprised me is that you don’t yet have a mandatory retrofit of stone or brick buildings - what’s called unreinforced masonry. Los Angeles mandated, forced the owners to make that improvement 30 years ago. So when the Northridge Earthquake happened we had no retrofitted URMs, and nobody died in an unreinforced masonry building in the Northridge earthquake.

So it doesn’t stop all damage. There’s still a big financial hit later, but it’s a huge life safety improvement. I see a shared problem with California, in general, about our older buildings that we know are problematic, and how do we get that improvement to happen? Because, at least the way it’s been in California, and I think the same thing is often true in New Zealand: the cost of retrofitting is put completely onto the building owner. But the benefit of retrofitting comes to the whole community. The neighbours now get to go to work as well; you get the use of your street; your tenants don’t die; they have a place to go back to work; and your central business district could stay open. So we make it an individual financial choice but it’s really a shared financial choice. We’re trying to explore ways right now in California - if we share the benefit, can’t we share the cost of the retrofitting? Yes, make it mandatory, but figure out how to share it.

Question: Can California benefit from the New Zealand model of earthquake insurance?

As a Californian, I look at the insurance coverage in New Zealand and can only envy what you have. You have a reasonably-priced product, and you’ve got a population that understands how necessary it is to their economic future. In California, we used to have more coverage. It was never above 50%, and the insurance companies lost so much money from the 40% coverage in the Northridge Earthquake, that they panicked and started to pull out of the market. There’s a negotiated solution that the State is trying to develop, but the premiums are very high. The coverage is really only catastrophic coverage. We have deductibles that often start at $100,000 dollars. And so it’s something that we need as a society, but at an individual choice it’s not a very good financial choice for us. And I think California could really learn from New Zealand about how the market is handled and priced, that maybe we could turn that around for California.

Question: What’s the medium to long term impact of an earthquake?

The problem with earthquakes is not just people dying. That’s what we fear emotionally, because the idea of dying in an earthquake is a particularly horrifying death: it comes without warning; all of those trigger our fear responses. But the real problem from earthquakes is not about our lives, it’s about our pocket-books.

You lost 20% of your GDP, and the economy is, you know, taking time to recover. In fact, Christchurch is a shining example to the rest of the world about how to get recovery pretty well; compared to what’s happened in many other events, it’s going relatively quickly. Now imagine that instead of Christchurch, it’s Auckland. Or imagine that it’s a 7 through Wellington, so the damage is several times what you had in Christchurch.

Those will happen at some point in your future. The economic devastation from those could set you back for decades. That’s the experience in San Francisco. It took it several decades to recover from the 1906 earthquake. And the investment upfront in those earthquake- strengthened buildings, it’s not just that the building won’t fall down, or that the building doesn’t kill people - it’s a building where you can go back to work afterwards.

Question: Are we getting closer to predicting earthquakes?

An earthquake early warning system makes use of the seismic networks that we already operate - GeoNet in New Zealand, CISN in California - which is already recording the earthquakes, recording the waves; doing that so fast that we can actually tell you that an earthquake is underway and get that message to you before the earthquake waves themselves get to you.

How much warning you get depends on how far away you are. As we’ve developed the system we are actually getting some warning everywhere of the arrival of the strong shaking, because there’s a weaker wave that comes before it. As you get farther away you can get up to tens of seconds, maybe even 75 seconds.