The Christchurch City Council is seeking more insurance cover for its underground assets worth $6.3billion.
For the past few months, the council has been trying to determine the amount of cover it needs for the city’s network of underground pipes and how to secure insurance, the
New Zealand Herald reported.
"Certainly it is a risk that we've had to carry for a long time. We do have a huge amount of underground infrastructure that is not insured," Raf Manji, Christchurch city councillor and insurance committee deputy chairman, was quoted as saying in the report.
Only 1.6% of the underground assets are insured, news website
Stuff also reported, as the council has obtained only $100 million worth of coverage from the Local Authority Protection Programme (LAPP) for water, wastewater and stormwater pipes.
According to the report, Manji prefers a higher level of cover for the underground infrastructure, but it may not be provided by the LAPP since it cannot insure the amount of cover that the council is looking at.
"We are seeing new interest in providing further cover for underground assets,”
Stuff quoted Manji as saying.
Manji said the council is exploring other options for insuring the underground assets including getting catastrophe insurance or parametric insurance, which insures for a specific event.
"In the old days you'd just insure pipes full stop and now we're trying to get a little bit more specific about what we are trying to insure against,” Manji was quoted as saying in the report.
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