Tsunami Evacuation Zones
Tsunami Evacuation Zones in the Canterbury Region
Created by: canterburymaps
Last updated: Thursday, April 27, 2017
Are you in a tsunami evacuation zone?
your property in the address search bar, or pan around the map to see
Canterbury’s tsunami evacuation zones.
information on when and how to evacuate, see our tsunami pages on the
Environment Canterbury website or contact your local emergency management
officer at your city or district council.
these zones mean?
The Red Zone
is the shore exclusion zone – beaches, estuaries and river mouths. Even if a
tsunami is not big enough to flood land, it can cause strong and unusual
currents in the water, and unpredictable surges onto beaches, which can knock people
off their feet.
You need to get out of the Red Zone in any
official tsunami warning or if you feel a long (more than a minute) or strong
(hard to stand up) earthquake, or if there is any official tsunami warning in place.
Zone is a land evacuation zone. This is a zone that could be flooded by a large
You need to get out of this zone if you feel a
long (more than a minute) or strong (hard to stand up) earthquake, or if you
are asked to leave by emergency services in an official tsunami warning.
The Christchurch City tsunami evacuation zones (Brooklands to
Taylors Mistake) are currently being reviewed, and evacuation zones are also
being developed for Banks Peninsula.
In sparsely populated areas where there are currently no
evacuation zones drawn up, you still need to move
inland (at least 1km) or to high ground if you feel a long (more than a minute)
or strong (hard to stand up) earthquake, or you get an official warning
the zones drawn?
The area flooded by a tsunami
depends on many things – the size of the earthquake, the direction it is coming
from and the tide level when the waves arrive. We can never say for sure
exactly which areas will be flooded in a tsunami, and every tsunami will be
When drawing tsunami evacuation
zones we consider many different tsunami scenarios. The evacuation zone
boundaries do not represent one tsunami scenario, rather they are drawn to
encompass the flooding from any tsunami we would expect in a 2500 year time
The zone boundaries also usually
follow some sort of feature that is easy to see on the ground, like roads, so
that you know whether you are in or out of the zone. We also consider the
locations of schools and rest homes, and may also include properties that may
not necessarily be flooded in a tsunami, but would have their access and
utilities cut off.
Access and Use Constraints