Lyttelton Plunket building to be demolished

The earthquake-damaged Lyttelton Plunket building is to be demolished.

At today’s Council meeting, it was agreed that the building should be demolished following advice from Council staff that it would not be cost-effective to repair.

The building was damaged in the 4 September 2010 earthquake and suffered significantly more damage in the 22 February 2011 earthquake. It has been closed since the September earthquake.

The Council’s decision to demolish the entire building comes after it received a Notice of Demolition from the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) under the Canterbury Earthquake Act 2011. Under the notice, the Council was required to demolish part of the building for safety reasons. However, as the staff recommendation for demolition was for the entire building, approval was needed from elected members before it could go ahead.

General Manager Community Services and Facilities Rebuild Plan Project Sponsor Michael Aitken says the Council is aware of the building’s significance to the Lyttelton community but, given its badly damaged state, it does not make sense to repair it.

“We appreciate that the Lyttelton community has lost many of its buildings and needs places to gather. 

However, we always knew that there would be some Council-owned buildings that are too badly damaged to repair and the Plunket building, unfortunately, falls into that category.”

Any decision around re-building will be made as part of the Council's Facilities Rebuild Plan project. Due to the number of buildings in the programme, decisions around the site could still be some months away.

For more information about the project visit www.ccc.govt.nz/facilitiesrebuild. Engineering reports page