Six months later, owners of flood-damaged homes still waiting for action

Report from RNZ by Bill Hickman
Residents in affected parts of Wellington’s southern suburbs are calling for action as they continue to struggle with the aftermath of flooding in April.

One person died and hundreds fled from their homes when severe thunderstorms overwhelmed storm water systems and flood water, mud and silt swept into homes.

Six months on and some residents say their neighbourhoods have been reduced to ghost towns while others are suffering the stress of an uncertain and costly future.

‘They just walked’

Lena Walton and her partner have lived in four different locations since the floods hit their Berhampore home of over 30 years.

She said repair work stalled as a collective of residents considered offers to buy out the homes on her street. But the deals fell through and now the neighbourhood felt like “a ghost town”.

“There are homes that are just sitting there, just empty.

“In Berhampore there was one house and the washing [that] was left there, on the line, on the day of the 19th is still there. Tenants that were in there, they just walked,” Walton said.

If the council offered ‘I would go’

Naomi Bowen said her family was still unable to use the lower level of their South Wellington home after water damage and slips left parts of the building’s foundations “hanging like teeth”.

She said she couldn’t sleep when it rained and stress was impacting her physical health.

“I love my street [but] right now, if the council offered to buy us out and it was enough to buy elsewhere, I would go.

“If anyone had been downstairs during that flood, when 1.2 metres [of water and mud] smashed down and through walls, [they] could have been seriously hurt or died.

“My niece was down there over Christmas and God knows what would have happened if they’d still been sleeping down there,” Bowen said.

Bowen said external work to protect her property from inundation was unlikely to be approved as she’d been told it could increase the risk to others.

She said she and her husband were caught between the massive cost of raising the building and the need to keep her family safe.

“We know that the stormwater infrastructure isn’t set up to work, and we also know, from their flood mapping, our property is the overflow path for our street and surrounding streets.

“How can we make our home resilient when there’s all these barriers against us?” Bowen said.

Storm water systems still ‘clogged up’

Repairs at Sonja Steinmetz’s Emerson Street home are nearing completion.

But she worries that, for all the effort and money the family had poured into the rebuild, the whole scenario could repeat again.

She said the community needed assurance from the council that the infrastructure could cope with future events.

“Something as simple as making sure the stormwater drains are not clogged up. It happens now still,” she said. “When we are having just regular rainfall the stormwater drains are getting clogged up.”

Catherine Leech’s family have been renting since it fled from its Owhiro Bay home through chest deep water in the middle of the night.

Leech said central government needed to do more to support the people impacted by the floods and to work alongside councils to find long term strategies to cope with future severe weather events.

“The response to Auckland and Cyclone Gabrielle compared [with] floods recently has been significantly different.

“We need them to step up and start listening to people that are saying ‘help us’. They can’t put their head in the sand and hope that the rain’s going to go away, it’s not going to happen,” Leech said.

In June, Emergency Management and Recovery Minister Mark Mitchell told RNZ he was open to proposals to assist the city’s recovery but the matter would need to instigated by the council.

“As with past flooding events, these matters sit with the relevant local council in the first instance,” Mitchell said.

A Wellington City Council spokesperson told RNZ work to complete an assessment of the city’s flood prone areas and the impact of the April storms is underway.