Saving earthquake-prone marae

This is a part of the Resilience feature

By Jenny Stein - 1 October 2022, Build 192

Whānau-isation, an innovative community-driven approach to strengthening earthquake-prone marae safely and cost-effectively, has been conceived in a Resilience to Nature’s Challenges National Science Challenge pilot project.

Amendments to the Building Act 2004, which came into effect on 1 July 2017, introduced the concept of earthquake-prone buildings (EPBs). Defined as a building that achieves less than 34% of the new building standard (NBS), an EPB is estimated to pose 10 times greater risk to life in the event of a moderate earthquake than an equivalent new building on the same site.

At some point, EPBs need to be upgraded or replaced, often at prohibitive expense.

Many marae have earthquake-prone buildings

Approximately 70% of Aotearoa New Zealand’s 1,300 marae are expected to have buildings classified as earthquake-prone over the next 20 years.

While some of the around 70% of marae that were built before 1976 and the modern Building Code may exceed the 34% NBS threshold, this cannot be determined without a structural engineer’s report.

The high cost of getting these reports means many marae may not meet the 7–25 year deadline for seismic assessment prescribed by the Act and so will have their pre-1976 buildings designated earthquake- prone by default.

Pilot project with earthquake-prone marae

This is a problem that Professor Regan Potangaroa (Ngāti Kahungunu) of Massey University is trying to solve. ‘They’ve got to pay $5,000 to $10,000 for each engineering report, for each individual marae,’ Regan explains. ‘Why don’t we just do a class action?’

As part of the Resilience Challenge’s kaupapa Māori workstream Whanake te Kura i Tawhiti Nui, Regan has completed a pilot project with three marae in Hastings, Masterton and Wellington and started working with earthquake-prone marae in the Far North.

He believes whānau-isation – the pooling of resources to take a hands-on, community- driven approach – could enable many to cost-effectively upgrade their buildings for safe and continued use.

Standardising engineering reports

Most marae have very similar buildings, so Regan suggests the same engineers adopt a standardised report they can adapt to assess multiple marae to maximise efficiency and minimise costs. This would also ensure consistency and help solve a problem some post-1976 marae buildings have with multiple conflicting reports.

‘Some buildings in Wellington have four engineering reports on them, and all of them disagree. So what’s a building owner supposed to do?’ Regan asks, reflecting on other work he is currently involved in.

Strengthen or replace?

Having established a definitive report, the next step for an EPB is to decide whether it should be upgraded or replaced.

Given the significant expense involved in either option, many marae may face the undesirable prospect of moving. This comes with high costs of its own, particularly in terms of people’s loss of attachment to place, which can be very strong, even for marae occupying non-traditional structures.

‘We’ve got building attachment regardless of it being an ex-RSA building,’ Regan says of Te Kainga Marae in Wellington, one of four marae involved in the pilot project.

Assessing community attachment

Regan is investigating people’s attachment to their buildings by 3D scanning marae and letting community members explore the resulting simulations using virtual reality headsets.

‘The trick we do is we take them into it when they’re in the building. When we digitally scan a building, so it’s photorealistic, and we take people back into it, it’s not the same building, and that’s the surprise.

‘They can do things that they couldn’t do before – they can look at the floor, they can step outside, they can teleport around the place. It’s a completely different experience.’

By tracking people’s movements and responses to the differences in what they see and feel as they explore the virtual and real structures simultaneously, Regan identifies hot spots and cold spots of activity. He then uses this information to quantify people’s attachment to different spaces.

‘There’s a whole lot of interesting stuff that’s coming out of it that we wouldn’t get from interviews.’

How whānau-isation could work in practice

Unfortunately, attachment doesn’t translate into the ability to pay for seismic upgrades, and having a designated EPB certainly doesn’t help. ‘If that building happens to be the toilet block or the kitchen or – God forbid – the main wharenui, it’s shutdown time, and the problem with shutting down the kitchen and the toilet block is then the income is stopped for the marae.’

This leaves marae caught in the catch-22 situation of having no income to pay for the required upgrades, and this is where Regan’s concept of whānau-isation comes in.

Regan explains the concept using a building that requires new piles as an example. ‘We can put in four 200 mm piles rather than one 800 mm one. For 800 mm, you need a special machine. But putting in 200 mm diameter piles, which we can get from Bunnings, and hiring a drill from Hirepool, we can drill holes and put piles in ourselves using our own forces.

‘That’s what I mean when I talk about whānau-isation. It’s trying to break it up into things that our own forces can do.’

Finding practical solutions that will achieve the necessary results without needing specialist personnel and equipment is something Regan has plenty of experience in, having been involved in the response to several humanitarian crises in Aotearoa New Zealand and around the world.

‘What we find as humanitarians is that we get given this solution and we have to find workarounds because it’s not contextually possible. That was the model that happened in Christchurch and the model that happened in Kaikōura.’

Steps to affordable upgrades

So what’s next for Regan and his work with earthquake-prone marae? ‘Firstly, we need to have this class action, so we have set up something that covers all in one hit.

Next thing is to go in one by one and sort through some of the issues.’

In time, Regan hopes to develop a website where people can go to check their marae. A trained structural engineer, he then intends to put together a small team who can provide marae-specific advice and show communities how whānau-isation can help keep costs down while getting their buildings up to Building Code.

This is developing good practices in promoting earthquake resilience at the individual and community level.