The day the EARTH FELL IN
Four months after massive flooding triggered a sinkhole in an Auckland suburb, authorities are struggling to repair the damage and lives have been altered forever. Cherie Howie reports.
Ram Shalendra wants out, badly. Azad Shaker wants in, badly. And Jaison Chacko, well, he’s already out, so now he just wants to know things are going to get better.
This is the story of small business owners where one of Auckland’s major arterial roads dips and curves through a working class suburb born of ceramics and railways and post-war bungalows, and what happened the day the water came.
It arrived on a Sunday afternoon in the second week of March, a time of year when moisture-packed tropical lows are not uncommon.
But this event, nicknamed the Tasman Tempest after it spent days building and churning in the waters between Australia and New Zealand, was no ordinary early autumn downpour.
It was a deluge. And when there was a blockage in a culvert carrying the Rewarewa Stream under Great North Rd — previously identified as a “hot spot” on Auckland’s stormwater network — that’s when the water came.
As it surged over Great North Rd, businesses were flooded, a 54-year-old building housing half a dozen businesses was compromised and, most dramatically, a large hole opened up on the northern side of the road, taking a footpath and carpark with it.
It took something else as well — the dreams of some of those who dare to take a shot at paving their own path, the people behind the half a million small businesses in New Zealand.
Survival on the margins can be tough and, for some, March 12 was their worst nightmare.
Jaison Chacko was in church when his brief foray into self employment came to an end. The 54-year-old hadn’t even served his first customer at Signs and Prints when floodwaters washed through. Worse, the father of three hadn’t organised insurance.
Chacko had moved more than $50,000 worth of equipment and machinery into the shop just two days earlier. He planned to organise insurance on the Monday morning. He never got the chance.
His family of four now survives on his wife’s income, he says.
It’s an understatement to say he feels let down.
“Someone’s ignorance made this problem in New Lynn. I feel [the culvert] wasn’t managed properly.”
Not so, says Craig Mcilroy, the general manager of Healthy Waters, the Auckland Council department that manages the city’s vast stormwater network.
As a known problem area, the culvert was cleared before all heavy rain events, Mcilroy says.
“Auckland Council has maintained this asset appropriately,” he says, matching comments made in January that the current and planned level of capital investment is appropriate to manage council’s stormwater asset risk profile.
It took four years for the council to match the capital spending of $105 million by former councils, the
Herald reported in March.
In the first four years stormwater spending rose from $40m (part year) to $83m, before rising to $119m in 2015. This year the budget is $150m. What happened in New Lynn on March 12 was “extraordinary“, Mcilroy says.
“The rain volumes over a very short period of time were very substantial.”
Sixty millimetres in two hours is what the records show.
At the time, Niwa meteorologist Ben Noll described that early autumn Auckland afternoon as a “weather traffic jam”, that produced isolated instances of once-in-a-century rainfall — more rain fell in the city than typically lands in the whole of March — and a tie in the record books for Auckland’s wettest March hour.
At Juleez Kitchen, on the western side of the stream, owner Ram Shalendra wasn’t going anywhere that wet afternoon.
He was aware of the drama outside — he could see people running up the street.
“There was a car in the water,” he says nonchalantly, by way of explanation. But he had his own problems to deal with.
The floodwaters didn’t reach the Indian restaurant, but the stuff falling from the sky was leaking through the roof. Amazingly, customers were still showing up hoping for lunch. If only it were still so. Patronage has halved since the flood — he blames road barriers and scant parking — and the second-time business owner has given up on his dream of building up the business to pass on to his son.
“Every day customers are not coming here, they’re just not. When it started raining, the disaster came.”
The 47-year-old is still at the coal front, but he’s hoping that will soon come to an end — the business is up for sale on Trade Me, a move made after a real estate agent told Shalendra he was not prepared to take on the sale.
There had been some interest, but it vanished when potential buyers heard the rent was $1000 a week with six years to run on the lease, Shalendra says.
For now, the focus is simply to keep a lid on the overheads, and neither he nor his son are earning a wage, despite sometimes working more than 12-hour days.
“I’m just targeting the rent now. I had to pay the last one with my credit card.”
Unsurprisingly, Shalendra isn’t sleeping well.
Two doors away, Azad Shaker is living that same nightmare. Boss Barbers had been open seven months when the disaster unfolded.
He stayed inside as floodwaters crept to about 5m from his front door, but he has hardly escaped the weather god’s cruel blow.
It was the 27-year-old’s first crack at putting himself at the helm; he had spent years working seven days a week for others and he has no regrets at giving it a shot.
But it would be untrue to say it has come without heartache.
“I’m not very happy with my luck.”
He was forced to close for almost three weeks after the flood and since then patronage has dropped to almost nothing on weekdays.
Family and friends are helping him get by and although the shop is open seven days he only goes in between Wednesday and Sunday.
“It has been doing my head in going there everyday, standing around and seeing those road cones [outside]. Sitting there by yourself, not making any money.
“It was pretty depressing those last few months.”
Upstairs, Western Tattoo escaped the muck, but with barriers out front, car parks lost to contractors out back and foot traffic down to almost nothing, business is also suffering.
Tattoo artist Geoff Thomas is paid by the tattoo, and at the moment that means earning not much.
“Usually on a Tuesday like this we’d have clients for both [owner] Steve [Ma Ching] and me and we’d have three or four people enquiring.
“But we’ve had no bookings and nobody coming in. If there are no tattoos, there’s no money.”
The business, whose most famous client is All Black superstar Sonny Bill Williams, is surviving on
“social media hustle”, Thomas says.
But he feels businesses in the area have been forgotten and he worries about his neighbours on the western side of the creek.
“We can definitely get by on our social media, but it’s the food outlets I feel for.”
Thomas is a frequent visitor to Kia Ora Superette a few doors down, and it’s no surprise store manager Ravinder Singh knows him by name.
Business at the superette has halved since the flood.
“People are just avoiding this area,” says Singh. “We don’t have the foot traffic.”
Even on the eastern side of the creek, closer to the train station and mall, some businesses continue to struggle.
Vaping might be the latest trend, especially for reformed smokers, but at Vape Crew manager Lee Pro and assistant Jean Miller spend much of the working day just keeping each other company.
The shop has gone from pulling in about $600 a day to between $100-$200 as customers struggle to get in the door, Pro says.
Miller says, “Customers can’t park on the side roads and even if they park at the Warehouse they can’t get through now because the footpath is closed.
“It was open and then it closed a few weeks ago. It’s a frustrating struggle to watch.”
“We’re now three months on and it’s really no better. You can drive through, that’s all. I feel sorry for the Chinese [restaurant owners] next door, because they were doing really well.
“I think they’ve just been surviving, like we have. But it’s just not right.” Yoshi Saegusa is also on the eastern side of the creek. He has owned Agito cafe for eight years and this is the toughest time he has faced. He’s okay, but he’s not sure for how long. “There is a limit.” His assistant brings out hot green tea to share, served impeccably, and Saegusa smiles. But it’s a smile that hides worry and the growing realisation he may have to sell his business. Except he’s not sure anyone would want to buy. “So I just hold on.”
Saegusa is an anomaly when the Herald on Sunday visits the area — it is the only premises on which we are interrupted by customers. Over the road at The Wardroom cafe, owner Nicola Donald is still waiting for lunchtime customers to arrive.
She’s a bit further back from the creek and hasn’t noticed such a downturn — perhaps 20 per cent at the most. And she’s pleased with the support given to businesses by the multiagency working group, which includes representatives from the council, Whau Local Board, Auckland Transport and the New Lynn Business Association, set up to guide the suburb through the disaster and recovery. “Traffic flow is our largest problem — they are just not coming through.”
Whau Local Board chairwoman Tracy Mulholland, who is also leading the working party, says support is being given to the business community, including a $7500 campaign letting people know the suburb is open for business.
She did not accept claims businesses have been kept in the dark about the post-flood recovery — newsletters have gone out and doors have been knocked on.
But she has empathy for the worst affected.
“These are not high-flying city businesses. They’re local community businesses, they’re the backbone for our community, these businesses that support local families.”
The flood was a “shocking experience”, she says.
“From the 24 years I’ve been involved with this community, I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Donald also won’t quickly forget the experience. She was in her shop as all hell broke loose down the road.
“It was pelting. It was like something else, I’d never seen rain like that before. We went outside and there were cars floating. [I thought] ‘is this actually happening’?”
It was and it did. And now it’s about putting it all back together and trying to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
The first job was to put in an emergency overflow capacity in case of another rain event, and to help clear the waterway. It took three weeks for the original culvert to be cleared, Mcilroy says.
It was not known where the material came from that blocked the culvert, but the structure itself was not damaged and will remain in place.
The plan now is to build a new
culvert the size of a double garage door and enabling works are being done now. The original culvert had a capacity of 6cu m a second. The new one will have a capacity of 50cu m a second.
More than 800 tonnes of rubble and silt — the equivalent of 80 loads of a six-wheeler truck — have been removed since the flood.
The final cost of the new culvert is still being negotiated with contractor Fulton Hogan, but it has an end date — February 28 next year, 12 days before the first anniversary of the disaster, Mcilroy says.
The culvert is designed to cater for a one-in-100-year flood, but also takes into account climate change forecasts, says Mcilroy. “It’s trying to take the worst-case view of what the future might throw at us.”
The events of March 12 have been termed by the council as “high severity”, he says.
Translation — that’s “probably as bad as it gets”.
“New Lynn got pummelled. It’s not a situation that anyone likes, it’s just unfortunately what it is.”
There was one positive — the council was working with the local board, business association and top urban designer Kobus Mentz, who was involved in the original master planning for the suburb in a previous regeneration project, to look at opportunities to turn the Rewarewa Stream into “a really nice public asset”, Mcilroy says.
“One of the ideas we’ve got is looking both upstream and downstream of the culvert and looking to create a much nicer landscape stream environment.”
That won’t be much comfort to Chacko, who these days keeps himself busy helping at a friend’s business. He isn’t sure what the future holds.
Asked how he’s coping, Chacko keeps his voice calm. But his words betray him.
“It’s very hard. All my earning for the last eight years, my investments, are gone in the water.”
I’d never seen rain like that before. We went outside and there were cars floating. I thought: ‘is this actually happening’? Nicola Donald