James Muirhead

And so we have

Thousands of those around our city are related to building our infrastructure and things like that.

And so Jill Kenny actually was the main person that worked on this, and she compiled over 8,000 boreholes looking at the depth of different layers below Auckland.

We then traced those out below Auckland and then looked at locations where they have been shifted to then infer and identify the locations of possible faults.

Yeah.

So I can't say the number for sure, but I think, you know, there's on the order of probably about 10 likely faults that are situated below the main sort of city of Auckland.

I'm not including, actually, when I say that, what's going on down by Pukekohe and the Hinoa Ranges.

There's one that runs near Beechlands.

There's another one that runs called the Avondale Fault, which obviously must be close to Avondale.

There's another one on what we call the Monaco Fault, and that will be at the northern end of the Monaco Harbour.

There are not ones that are running directly below the main city of Auckland that we could tell, so not below the CBD.

And there aren't any running through the CRL.

As far as we can tell, the current data that we have suggests that there isn't a fault line that would run below that underground infrastructure.

Actually, for me personally, it's not surprising.

I would be careful calling us the city of seismicity when you actually look at the rest of the country.

The thing about it, it's the perception that we have in our country about earthquake hazards that has helped us in a way to ignore Auckland.

And that's because we live on a plate boundary.

And that's the Hikarangi subduction margin.

It sits off the east coast of New Zealand and then it transforms into the Alpine Fault and runs through the South Island.

The closer you are to that margin, the higher the seismic hazard, in a way.