There are signs of panic abroad and official pronouncements are being made based on woeful depths of ignorance.
An article in last Thursday's Otago Daily Times was headlined "3500 NZ buildings `need reinforcing"'.
Such was the commission's sense of urgency it made the recommendation before it began its public hearings.
That was rash because it is based on a report which grotesquely underestimates the real size of the problem.
If implemented thoughtlessly, it would either put a large dent in the Government's already battered accounts or impose a huge financial burden on local authorities and/or severely impact on the lives of people who own or occupy the nation's URMs.
Nowhere would be so badly affected as Dunedin, except perhaps Oamaru.
How did the commission make this mistake? It was concerned that in the February 22 earthquake, 42 people died as the result of the failure of URMs.
This was reflected in a report it had received which urged it to take just this sort of precipitate action over URMs.
However, the commission did pause to consider, as that report had not, the fact that 140 people died in buildings which were reinforced, mostly in two structures built in the 1960s and 1970s.
A number of still later-built reinforced buildings also spectacularly failed.
This has led some in the engineering fraternity to assert that even buildings constructed in the 1990s cannot be regarded as safe and that we need a sharp upgrade of present building codes.
Now, if every reinforced building in New Zealand constructed before, say, 1993 were to be compulsorily retrofitted to strengthen it, what would it cost and who would pay? I imagine by the time that suggestion got to Bill English and John Key's desks, someone would have hazarded a figure and those gentlemen would shake their heads and demur.
It would simply be too onerous. A lesser remedy would be sought.
But to go back to the URMs. The authors of the report put the 2010 value of their estimated 3750 URMs at NZ$1.5 billion.
They also opined to the commission that the cost of upgrading them to 67% of present codes might be about $2 billion.
That's the cost nationally, so it might not seem too eye-watering, but unfortunately it's wildly wrong.
The presentation to the commission was based on a 2010 academic article Prevalence of New Zealand's Unreinforced Masonry Buildings written by Associate Prof Jason Ingham in the civil and environmental engineering department of Auckland University and Alistair Russell, a PhD student there.
Prof Ingham kindly sent me a copy and I have discussed it with him. One glance at one figure shows it is deeply flawed.
In table 4 on page 191, it estimates that in the whole of Otago and Southland there are only eight URMs built before 1900.
But look around. In the southeast quadrant of the Octagon alone there are four - including the modern-seeming Ra Bar.
On the corner of Moray Pl and Stuart St there are two more, the Fortune Theatre and Tangente Cafe.
Across Moray Pl there's another and further up Stuart St there is Chapman Terrace.
We're up to eight and haven't mentioned famous ones like First Church, Knox Church, Otago Boys' High, the Municipal Chambers or the University's clock tower (I'm using the article's definitions of buildings and reinforcing).
The authors got their figures by extrapolating from a few city councils' information and comparing that with numbers from Quotable Value New Zealand.
But the latter's come from the same council records and council records only give ready results for structures built after July 1901 when the building permit system started.
I informed Prof Ingham, who graciously acknowledged the figure was wrong.
In Otago and Southland there are certainly hundreds, probably thousands, of pre-1900 URMs.
There will be thousands more, though proportionately fewer, in the rest of New Zealand.
Post 1900, the figures are more reliable and you can see Otago/Southland's numbers proportionately dwarf the rest of New Zealand's.
Our few people carry by far the greatest part of this burden - or responsibility.
A true national total would greatly exceed 3500. The true cost of upgrading to 67% would be much more than $2 billion.
Otago/Southland's share alone would greatly exceed that.
If it was thrown back entirely on us, we have fewer than 300,000 people to do the paying.
Something should be done and the Dunedin council's more active policy aiming for 33% will be a step in the right direction.
