This video is an update from Auckland Council’s Head of Engineering Resilience Ross Roberts on the progress of our geotechnical investigations at Muriwai.
GHD are on track to complete the geotechnical study by the end of August.
It’s important to bear in mind that the geotechnical report will present the risk, but not the categorisation for each property.
Part of the challenge is that the parameters for the government’s risk categorisation framework are still not fully defined, so there’s a limit to how far we can go. The Ministry for the Environment and Treasury are developing the approach to the level and consistency of risk threshold (alongside how the costs will be shared, and what the legal framework will be), and this will inform the details of how categories will be defined. You can find out more about this on the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet website.
The process for providing property categories will be shared with you as soon as it is available, but please be assured that we are advocating for this policy to be completed as quickly as possible.
We expect that the categorisation process will be faster for homes where the risk is clearly very high or very low, and may take longer for homes where the risk is marginal, or where the risk can be mitigated by implementing engineering solutions which would need to be assessed.
Our expectation is that we will be able to quickly downgrade some homes from a red to a white placard once the report has been completed and areas of future risk are clearly defined. Ross Roberts explains more about this in the video above. We are hopeful that central government’s work will be completed and announced soon so we can rapidly move into the next steps and provide homeowners with the certainty they have been waiting for.
As mentioned in our 27 July newsletter, a meeting for affected property owners within the Muriwai geotechnical study area will take place on Tuesday 29 August. This meeting will discuss the study results. We will be contacting this group directly with a meeting invite. If you are a property owner in the Muriwai geotechnical study area, and you have not received an invitation by 5pm Monday 14 August, please let us know by emailing muriwai@aucklandcouncil.govt.nz (including your property address). A draft copy of the geotechnical report will be provided to property owners ahead of the meeting.
