Decisions without data

After the Christchurch earthquakes, property managers faced intense pressure to make safety calls without timely engineering assessments. Engineers were overwhelmed, waits for building assessments stretched into months, and go or no-go decisions were often made with little or no data. That put tenants and business continuity at risk.

New Zealand has more than 20,000 earthquakes a year, about 250 of them felt, according to GeoNet. For a portfolio spread across Christchurch and Wellington, PMG needed a better answer than experience and guesswork.

• Delayed access to engineers meant long waits for building assessments.
• Property managers had to make go or no-go decisions with little or no data.
• Tenants lacked confidence in the response process.
• Alarms based on regional earthquake data caused unnecessary evacuations.

A response plan for each building

PMG worked with Canterbury Seismic to install accelerographs and implement Sentinel™, a building-specific response plan that reflects each building's own seismic tolerances. The sensors measure the shaking the building actually experienced, not just how big or how far away the earthquake was.

Those measurements are compared against each building's limits, based on New Zealand Building Code standards, and translated into a simple status:

• White: no action needed.
• Amber: inspect non-structural elements.
• Red: potential structural damage. Evacuate and assess.

The rollout was led by Paul Drummond, Chief Executive of Canterbury Seismic, working closely with PMG's facilities management team. Planning began more than a year ahead, with installations coordinated across multiple sites and each building's thresholds calibrated to its own seismic profile.

The hard part wasn't the sensors

Installing the instruments was the straightforward part. The bigger job was making the response stick: keeping stakeholder lists current and making sure on-site contacts know exactly what to do when an alert comes through.

“PMG’s remote property managers now benefit from immediate visibility into seismic events, limiting the need for on-site inspections to stronger events and enabling continuity of operations.”Massimo Crestanello, Facilities Manager, PMG

The results

• Fast, informed decisions after an earthquake.
• Tenant safety and confidence protected, without unnecessary evacuations.
• A data-led response that supports PMG's obligations under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015.
• A stronger ESG story on both environmental risk and governance.
• Less business disruption, with remote property managers able to act with confidence.

The result is a standard earthquake response plan, set up in advance, that PMG can use anywhere in its portfolio. Uncertainty is replaced with a measured answer for each building.