History
In 1987 the Greater Wellington Regional Council bought the building for $22 million ($45.2 million in 2014 dollars). [1] [3] After the CTV Building collapsed in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake and led to 115 deaths, buildings throughout the country were checked for non-ductile columns, which led to the CTV Building collapse. Non-ductile columns were found in the building, as well as "serious flaws with the building", [4] such as that the foundations were not designed to respond well to liquefaction (the soil under the building has "high potential" for liquefaction [4] ), the piles were lightly reinforced and, according to The Dominion Post, its "concrete floors were liable to fail in a major quake". [1] This led the regional council to decide in late 2012 that it would leave the building. [4] However, the council still used the building when the 2013 Seddon earthquake occurred, but it moved to the Shed 39 in the waterfront as the earthquake caused damage to the building, [5] including cracked shear walls and burst pipes that flooded five floors. [1] In 2014, the earthquake-prone building was valued at $2.3 million, which would have represented a loss by the regional council of 95 per cent of its investment. [1] [3] In 2015, it was valued at $3.2 million, which entirely consisted of the value of the land. [6] It was estimated that it would cost $5.2 million to bring the building up to 40 per cent of the New Building Standard (below 34% is considered earthquake-prone [7] ) and $32 million to bring it up to 100 per cent of the standard. [4]
In 2015 the building was listed for sale by the regional council [4] and it was bought by Eyal Aharoni, who also owned 61 Molesworth Street. After the November 2016 Kaikōura earthquake, the Wellington City Council reported that they had found evidence that Pringle House had been lived in two months before the earthquake, despite it being condemned. In September the council had received complaints about people living in the building, and people speaking to The Dominion Post reported seeing what appeared to them as about 10 secondary school droup-outs living in the top floor of the building and using it for parties. The council said however that it believed that no one was in the building when the earthquake struck. [6]
Because people were illegally entering the building, several methods have been employed to prevent people from entering, such as adding barricades. [8] [9] In June 2024, an employee of the building's owner said that they had removed 18 trespassers from Pringle House in the past 90 days. That month, a man was critically injured after falling three floors down an earthquake-damaged stairwell. [2] [9]
This page is based on this
Wikipedia article Text is available under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
