Property developers for a central Wellington apartment which was evacuated on Sunday night say it was a false alarm triggered by one resident, and the building has no structural damage following a large earthquake.
The Victoria Lane Apartments on Victoria St were evacuated and cordoned off for two hours over reports of concerns over structural damage to the building, following a magnitude-5.7 earthquake in the early hours that morning.
Cordons were in place on surrounding streets, including at the intersections of Victoria/Dixon St, Victoria/Ghuznee St, and Dixon/Taranaki St.
Fire and Emergency (FENZ) shift manager Alison Munn said staff by 11.30pm the building was “deemed safe to re-enter”.
David McGuinness, managing director at Willis Bond — the property developers for the apartments — said in a statement the alarm was triggered by one resident “citing physical disturbance in their apartment”.
As a precaution, FENZ evacuated the building and put in place a cordon to inspect it, he said.
He said the FENZ controller and the urban search and rescue (USR) engineer for Wellington, and members of the building’s engineers, Dunning Thornton, inspected the building and found it structurally found, without any evidence of damage.
“This was in its truest sense, a false alarm,” McGuinness said.
“We stand by the fact that base isolation is the gold standard for seismic resilience, and the fact that the building has been thoroughly inspected following this incident and found to have no damage is the best way to illustrate this.”
McGuinness said the evacuation was a “huge inconvenience” for residents, and many of them waited in a cafe across the road owned by one of the apartment residents.
On Sunday, a resident in a neighbouring apartment building told RNZ the building was evacuated because it had been swaying since the morning’s earthquake – but multiple residents RNZ spoke to on Monday said that was not true.
Resident Ilia Kopylov said he felt completely safe going back into the building, and did not feel any shaking throughout the day. He did not know anyone else who had felt shaking.
“I’m on the 11th floor and I’ve talked to other people on the other floors and no one felt anything — so it seems like a false alarm.”
Another resident, who did not want to be named, said claims the building was shaking all day were “not true at all”.
“The earthquake was a gentle sway and then it settled down, the building kept rocking a little bit as it’s supposed to with the base isolators.
“And then for the rest of the day there was nothing — sounds like there was just one nervous person.”
The 16-storey building had 123 apartments, and retail and commercial offices on the lower four floors.
Completed in March 2023, the apartments were marketed as setting “a new standard in apartment seismic safety as Wellington’s first base-isolated apartment development”.
By Ellen O’Dwyer of rnz.co.nz
