" extreme geographic resilience"
Um you do know the locals refer to them as The Shaky Isles? Natural disasters are so possible in NZ that on the inside back cover of the phone book is your local Civil Defence information. Living on the former salt marsh of South Dunedin less than 200m from the beach ours was Tsunami risk. My sister on their former 'lifestyle block' on the flanks of the Taranaki Volcano it was Lahar risk. My other sisters in Auckland have to worry about another volcanic cone opening in the Auckland Volcanic Field (last erupted about 1200ACE forming Rangitoto Island, a blink of an eye geologically).
In the centre of the North Island is a large round photogenic lake, with hot water beaches and views of the Tongariro Volcano to the South (with Ngarahohe (mount Doom) and Ruapehu south of that). Lake Taupo is a caldera and it too has blown relatively recently.
The scientists say the Main Divide fault at the plate boundary in the South Island (see those lovely snow capped peaks running as a spine?) is due to let go. It could make the Kaikoura 7.9 (2-9m uplift) look like a picnic. NZGov is focussed on making towns, cities, communities more locally resilient so they can survive cut off from anywhere else for longer.
Nobody in their right mind would rely on being safe in NZ. It is lovely and the danger is manageable (nobody was directly killed by the Kaikoura quake but only because it happened in the Early Hours) the main highway got steps put in it and/or the rails from the railway shunted onto it or the Mountains fell on it. There were fears of motorists under the landslides but nobody was.
There were two Christchurch quakes, the first was also early hours and caused facade collapses. Those killed people in the midday big one. No infrastructure can be built to survive metres of uplift or liquifaction. They're still finding and fixing broken pipes in ChCh.
If you are thinking of a NZ bolthole stock it well with dried or canned food, don't rely on frozen and a shedload of bottled water. Oh and accessible camping gear if your main lair is uninhabitable and batteries/windups/solar or wind generators. Which forms a large part of the bug out package households in NZ are recommended to have. My daughter in Dunedin and her husband have one. Their house is on a slope and could easily slide down it in a Big One or just break. NZ houses are code built not to fall on your head in a quake. They are not built to survive and be habitable afterwards.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
