Lower Hutt geohazards centre shaking up the way we monitor earthquakes

In the offices of GNS Science in Lower Hutt sits the only place in the world that oversees tsunami, earthquakes, volcanoes and landslides at once.

The National Geohazards Monitoring Centre opened in mid-December last year and since then has been monitoring our hazards 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Eight screens display cameras, maps and graphs in the state-of-the-art centre, and are watched closely by analysts around the clock.

The centre has completely changed the way our hazards are monitored and advised - for the better.

New Zealand's position on the boundary of two ever-grinding tectonic plates and the Ring of Fire makes it one of the most vulnerable places on the planet to natural disasters.

Each year, GeoNet picks up some 15,000 earthquakes across the country's volcanic zones and myriad faults – all of which are overshadowed by the looming threat of a major rupture on the South Island's Alpine Fault, or in the Hikurangi Subduction Zone off the East Coast.

Bruce Girdwood, the centre's project sponsor, said the most important thing when it came to natural hazards was time.

"People need time to be able to move away from something that is happening, or for us to understand where to put emergency services in.

"With a tsunami for instance, we are now monitoring the Pacific with all our international collaborators. We can see that in real time and we are able to give a much quicker response to when a tsunami may be coming."

Before the centre was opened, the monitoring was done on an on-call basis. The automated GeoNet system relayed information to duty managers.

"If that happened overnight they had to get out of bed, figure things out and then communicate back to Ministry for Civil Defence and emergency management," Girdwood said.

Screens at the National Geohazard Monitoring Centre. Photo / Emme McKay

He said having the 24/7 watch added huge value to emergency management.

They were able to provide advice about what was happening from a geohazard point of view quickly to emergency management systems.

He said the centre had been fantastic for the past seven weeks, and performance turn-around and response times were much better.

Earlier this month, there were two separate earthquakes where the waves arrived in New Zealand at the same time.

Girdwood said their instruments initially made it look like a large earthquake had occurred off the East Coast but it was confusing information from two different places.

"That really challenged our analytical people to understand what was going on. We may have provided a bit of information through our automated system which was not actually correct but we were able to correct it really quickly with our staff on board 24 hours a day."

The next step for the centre was to "raise the game" with better tools, analytics and faster responses.