Client: Greater Wellington Regional Council

Authors: David Norman and Kel Sanderson

Date: September 2009

This project developed a framework for measuring the business interruption losses from lifeline disruption after a rupture of the Wellington fault line. Working with Greater Wellington Regional Council and the Wellington Lifelines Group, we estimated likely lifeline restoration times, industry dependencies on various lifelines, building structural damage, and lifeline interdependence.

This allowed us to estimate the business interruption losses due to lifeline disruption in the first year after the quake as being around $4.3 billion. Depending on the expected level of economic growth after the first year, there could be ongoing losses of more than $1 billion dollars in Year 2. Losses in Year One would total around 20 percent of Wellington Metropolitan Area GDP.

BERL job#: 4798