Regional Hazards

The Civil Defence Emergency Management Group is required to consider any and all hazards that may lead to a declaration of a state of local emergency. These hazards must be of significant enough to be beyond the ability of emergency services to cope.

The most likely hazards of the Bay of Plenty region to reach this threshold are the major natural hazards:

• Volcanic eruption or a threatening eruption from any one of the volcanic centres of the region, or adjacent to the region.
• Earthquakes of high-magnitude can occur within any of the seismic (earthquake) fault belts of the region, or from sources adjacent to the region.
• Flooding or other storm-related damage throughout the region.
• Tsunami impact on the coastline of the region.

It is possible that other, technological (human-made) hazards could also cause major impacts on parts of the region.

Such impacts could be generated by:

• Failure of a hydro, water storage or natural dam
• Explosion of a large fuel storage or industrial facility
• Fire in a toxic chemicals storage or manufacturing area, possibly including a bulk carrier of one kind or another, leading to high-volume gas release
• Catastrophic transport accident, including aircraft crash within an urban area.

Maps of hazardous areas

• Active Faults within the Bay of Plenty region (386KB, pdf)
• Waiohau Fault (Galatea Segment) Fault Rupture Scenario Map (429KB, pdf)
• Kerepehi Fault (Kerepehi Segment) Fault Rupture Scenario Map (425KB, pdf)
• Waiohau Fault (Matahina Segment) Fault Rupture Scenario Map (428KB, pdf)
• Matata Fault Rupture Scenario Map (521KB, pdf)
• Whakatane Fault (Ruatoki Segment) Fault Rupture Scenario Map (428KB, pdf)
• Whakatane Fault Rupture Scenario Map (504KB, pdf)
• Liquefaction Hazard within the Bay of Plenty region (292KB, pdf)
• Major Earthquake Features in the Bay of Plenty region (547KB, pdf)
• Volcanic Hazard in the Bay of Plenty (591KB, pdf)