27 August 2019

The Waikato Regional Hazards Portal is a handy tool for home buyers seeking information on prospective properties.

Much like a LIM, the portal contains all the spatial natural hazard information available from Waikato Regional Council, as well as some data from other organisations.

Waikato Regional Council Resilience Team Leader Rick Liefting says natural hazards have the potential to cause disruption, damage properties and take lives, and can also affect the value and insurability of properties now or in the future.

“This is important to consider when building or buying a property, particularly with climate change projected to increase the frequency and severity of events such as river flooding and coastal erosion and inundation.

“Getting your hands on the right information can be quite challenging, time consuming and overwhelming, especially for new home buyers, but the portal is a one-stop shop for all natural hazard information. At the very least, people should be able to understand what hazards may impact a property and where further investigations may be required.

“It’s an easy way for anyone to do their own research, and become aware of the situations that may affect their property or development plans. Ultimately we want people to make good decisions.”

The online tool, an interactive map which zooms right down to individual properties, has information on flood, seismic, volcanic and coastal hazards.

“It doesn’t have information for all of the Waikato region, just what we currently have, but it’s a great start.”

The information available has different levels of accuracy – from individual property scale, which is suitable for resource/building consents or for district plans, to a general scale, where the data is to be used for information purposes only.

“We get a lot of requests for flood hazard or coastal inundation information from property buyers,” says Mr Liefting. “And this portal makes that information easily accessible to everyone.

“In future, we will update the tool with new information, and provide a complete report for any property by the click of a button.”

The Waikato Regional Hazards Portal is available at waikatoregion.govt.nz/regional-hazards-portal.

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