Legal action can be taken regarding the Ministry’s evacuation of the Wellington office due to earthquake risk

Legal action is possible regarding the Department of Education vacating its Wellington head office due to earthquake hazards.

The Department of Education’s main office is in Wellington. picture:

The department said it pulled staff a month ago after engineers rated the 12-storey building at 25 percent of the New Building Standards (NBS).

The building’s owner, Wellington Investment Group, said the department acted prematurely based on a “limited” initial assessment.

“We have informed the tenant that we reserve the right to hold them liable for product defamation,” Wellington Investment Group Director Brian Coburn told RNZ.

“We will consider our treatments as soon as we have more time to assess the situation.

“What we do know is that we had bought the building in 2019 [engineers] Beca conducted a high-level review of available seismic reports, and Beca concluded that the building contained approximately 80 percent of NBS.”

Coburn said it was “very perplexing” why the department chose to act on the basis of an assessment aimed at evaluating the floors rather than the entire building.

“Before making their decision, we offered the tenant to obtain, at our own expense, a detailed seismic assessment of the building and to share the report with.

They chose to respond to a limited and targeted report.”

The company and the ministry conduct their own separate complete seismic assessments.

Coburn said Wellington Investment Group’s assessment will be conducted by August.

“Until you can look at all the elements of the building and model the calculations, you can’t come up with a seismic rating for the building,” he said.

“But that didn’t stop this tenant from jumping to that conclusion.”

The targeted assessment conducted in March for the ministry uses the latest methodology, called Yellow Chapter, which accounts for new findings about flooring failures detected in the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake, but lacks the legal force to declare any building earthquake-prone.

Target assessment recommends a full Detailed Seismic Assessment (DSA).

“We’ve challenged the validity of a limited target report that states very clearly that it recommends … a full DSA,” Coburn said.

“We respect the building owner’s right to share his or her views,” said Zoe Griffiths, the company’s president at the Department of Education.

This kind of friction was to be expected.

Engineers warned in a report last year to the Department for Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) that they had heard about “confusion and misunderstanding about the Seismic Building Rating Regulations.”

“Companies and government agencies that evacuated buildings contributed to this confusion,” the report said. “Some building owners set a precedent for building inspections, closings, or departures in addition to what is required by current regulations.”

The ministry’s risk assessment told the main office that its engineer indicated that “there is no objection to the continued occupation of the building while the treatment strategy is developed and implemented.”

But the ministry said that even if the level of risk is appropriate, disruption to the work promotion will affect staff staying there.

And the “residual risk” of a major earthquake “is greatly reduced by removing them from the building at the earliest opportunity,” the risk assessment said.

Last year’s MBIE report said the yellow chapter was “technically superior and more straightforward” than the section corresponding to the old methodology, called the Red Book.

She said the engineers wanted just one guide for seismic assessments. Having two “creates confusion and more uncertainty in the market”.

“Having both the Red Book and the Yellow Chapter adds complexity to building owners’ choices and decisions, both in terms of making assessments and deciding what to do about the findings.

“Building owners want confidence in seismic assessment guidelines and expect regulations to be based on the latest knowledge.”

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