Auckland Council Flood Recovery

The 2023 Auckland Anniversary floods and Cyclone Gabrielle damaged thousands of properties and cost some people their homes. Auckland Council set up the Tāmaki Makaurau Flood Recovery Office to lead the recovery and channel support to affected homeowners, and brought RCP in for programme and project management.

The largest and most complex piece was categorising landslide-affected properties to work out the risk to life from further slips. It started in Waitākere, where RCP managed the geotechnical assessment of around 300 properties client-side, with GHD, CMW and LDE delivering the assessments. Using Waitākere as the template, the process rolled out across Auckland, drawing more than 3,100 property opt-ins, over 1,400 desktop triages and more than 250 full assessments across twelve geotechnical consultants. Each result fed Auckland Council's decision to fund engineering fixes or, where the risk to life was intolerable, buy the home out.

RCP also ran a set of natural-hazards projects fast-tracked into the Recovery Office. An Auckland-wide landslide susceptibility study with WSP rated the risk across the region's hills, cliffs, rivers and slopes to guide safer planning and consenting. A coastal-cliff LiDAR survey, flown by helicopter, built a 3D model of the coastline so asset managers could monitor erosion and cliff stability. RCP took on the National Landslide Database with Beca, a public geospatial record of landslides for researchers, consultants and the community, and built the systems to manage and automate the categorisation data behind all of it.

Across all of it, RCP worked alongside the Council and its partners to speed the immediate recovery and leave Auckland better prepared for the next event, with the natural-hazards work handed back to the Council's technical team to carry on.