The recovery in Canterbury was complicated by a number of factors.

• There were 14,000 earthquakes between September 2010 and June 2012.
• Several earthquakes of magnitude 3-4 occurred in 2016.
• 56 quakes were larger than magnitude 5.0.
• Each major event caused more damage, meaning further assessments were needed and more costs needed to be apportioned between insurers and Toka Tū Ake EQC for each event.
• Many buildings in Christchurch were made of unreinforced brick or masonry, which was very vulnerable to damage in the shaking and could cause more damage when it fell.
• Land stability and administrative authority factors, including the establishment of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA), meant rebuilds couldn’t start for almost 2 years.
• Over 7,000 homes were red-zoned (deemed to be on land that was no longer safe to be built on).
• Mass land movements in the Port Hills delayed recovery efforts.
• Parts of the city sank between 50- and 100cm.
• Thousands of sites needed geotech assessments to determine how safe the land was to build on.
• 7,000 homes became vulnerable to further liquefaction and 7,000 others became vulnerable to 1-in-100-year flooding. 2,000 homes became vulnerable to both.
• Liquefaction removal took 2 months for each of the 3 main earthquakes.
• New building guidelines had to be developed for properties prone to liquefaction or flooding.
• House insurance policies were for full replacement, not sum insured. That meant that for each policy where a repair or rebuild couldn’t be facilitated, insurers and customers had to negotiate what the total value of the loss was before claims could be settled.
• A lot of infrastructure was damaged. Repairs to services such as roads, sewerage, plumbing and power all impacted how and when rebuilds can be conducted.
• There weren’t enough tradespeople to do the work needed.
• The local council’s building consenting process collapsed under the number of consents that needed to be issued, creating delays of up to several months.
• Land movement could affect property boundaries, shifting them or causing 2 properties to encroach on each other. This caused a lack of legal certainty around titles and made sales and purchases complex and challenging.
• Many people owned property on cross lease titles. 100% agreement is needed to move repairs forward on these but some owners were underinsured, did not have insurance or could not be located. A large number of the outstanding claims in Canterbury are attributable to cross lease titles.
• 1,354 commercial buildings needed to be demolished – 826 in the central business district (CBD) and 528 in the suburbs.
• Cordons were up around the CBD for a total of 29 months. This affected who could get in and what work they could do.
• Some repairable commercial buildings were acquired and demolished on government orders due to safety concerns of buildings around them, without reference to how this would impact on the building owners’ and occupiers’ insurance.
• Private insurers could only begin repair work or settlement negotiations once Toka Tū Ake EQC had transferred a claim to them. The scale of the event challenged Toka Tū Ake EQC to have the resources and processes in place to complete this work quickly and accurately so progress on transferring over caps was often slow.
• The transfer of claims from Toka Tū Ake EQC to insurers created double-handling because private insurers then had to commission their own technical reports and assessments and often homeowners commissioned their own reports, meaning multiple expert reports were often attached to a single property. This, along with different interpretations of the loss, led to disputes and delays.
• Some of the most damaged properties weren’t transferred from Toka Tū Ake EQC to private insurers until years after the event.