Our surveyors have been working for Kaikoura District Council on land surveying after the recent earthquakes. The Council needed information quickly to ensure the safety of those working and living in the area.
Boyd Thomson, Licensed Cadastral Surveyor, said “we flew into Kaikoura and got straight to work on surveying the area. Initially our work involved monitoring a potential landslip above some houses, eight properties were threatened, they had been evacuated and yellow stickered. We provided the information to engineers who were then able to advise Council on the stability of the slope and risk of landslide to the houses in the area. The surveying teams then went on to work on further land surveys around the Kaikoura harbour.”
Our surveyors:
- Map the land, infrastructure and key landscape features
- Monitor where the land has changed – and is still changing
- The three different areas we measured were analysed to discover if they have moved relative to each other – and, importantly, by how much
- Ongoing assessment whether the land is still moving or likely to move in the future
Boyd added “the information land surveyors gather is needed for health and safety assessments with one of the key questions being ‘is this land going to move any further?’ The data is used to evaluate the risk to settlements, roads and infrastructure. We mapped the cracks and recorded the damage so that future evaluations could be undertaken.”
We work closely with LINZ and the Council to build on our knowledge base. Control networks often move in earthquakes, so we need to ensure the marks are still reliable and can be trusted as a reliable system to work from.
Survey data is also useful in understanding land movement and the complex system of fault lines within New Zealand. Click here to read more about our surveying services and more project examples.
