20 Mar 2025
A revised version of section C5 of the Non-Earthquake-Prone Building Seismic Assessment Guidelines is now available to industry.
The updated Section C5 released today supersedes the 2018 Yellow Chapter and can be found on the Design Resilience website.
The updates improve the clarity, consistency and accuracy of non-earthquake-prone building assessments. The changes to Section C5 of the Guidelines incorporate the latest understanding of how concrete buildings perform in earthquakes - representing the latest technical information available to engineers.
Engineers should use the revised version when carrying out assessments, with one exception. They must use the existing July 2017 version when assessing whether a building is earthquake-prone under legislation. In this situation, the owner of the building will have a letter from the territorial authority advising that the building is potentially earthquake prone, requesting that the owner of the building provides an engineering assessment.
The revised version has been released by the Joint Committee for Seismic Assessment and Retrofit - who are New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering, the Structural Engineering Society of New Zealand, the New Zealand Geotechnical Society, MBIE and Natural Hazards Commission Toka Tū Ake, with support from Engineering New Zealand.
Further updates to the Non-EPB Seismic Assessment Guidelines are scheduled for 2025, including updates to provisions for geotechnical assessments and unreinforced and reinforced masonry. The Joint Committee expects to consult on these provisions in mid-2025 and, publish the final version with these updated provisions by the end of the year.
