Southern Response Earthquake Recovery Services is the government-owned company responsible for settling claims by AMI policy holders for the Canterbury earthquake damage. To date, they have settled an estimated $3 billion in earthquake claims, needing repair or replacement of residential property.
A significant portion of the damaged houses were unknowingly built on old contaminated sites including uncontrolled fill, former municipal landfills, horticultural land, or land containing other localised contaminants (asbestos, lead pain, etc). This contamination risk presented a massive safety concern to owners and to the client, as well as representing significant commercial risk to the client.
The client required an efficient but robust solution to process the exorbitant amount of work to be done to identify and manage the risk of these sites. This work needed to be completed both in the context of the earthquake recovery as a whole and the enactment of the then new National Environmental Standard for Assessing and Managing Contaminants in Soil to protect Human Health.
ENGEO was engaged as the Technical Consultant within the team which obtained the first global consent under this standard which streamlined the assessment process at a very challenging time.
Obtaining this consent required braking new ground as well as gaining the trust of the Christchurch City Council (as the local consent authority). ENGEO has delivered as a Trusted advisor to the client leading to great collaboration and technical delivery.
