Shock as hillside slides down driveway
After a nervous night in the Nelson suburb of Enner Glynn, resident James Whittington woke feeling happy that his neighbours’ houses were still in the same place that they were when the sun went down.
‘‘We survived the night,’’ the Coster St resident said yesterday morning.
A series of slips from a paddock above the street slid down a steep driveway on Thursday, breaking the kitchen window of a neighbouring house and entering the home.
The first slip on Thursday morning was cleared by contractors, only for a second and third slip to come down afterwards.
The slips ended close to Whittington’s property. He stayed at home to clear the drains periodically.
‘‘My sense of normalcy is still in place,’’ he said yesterday morning.
While the weather was ‘‘soupy’’ and foggy, without the rain it was ‘‘amazing’’, he said.
‘‘You turn the tap off in the sky and everything else seems calmed down.’’
On Thursday afternoon Whittington watched the drama unfold.
While other residents were evacuating, he was staying put to clear drains where possible.
He said he saw reeds from the paddock on the hill that ‘‘just floated down’’ the driveway with the mud and were sitting upright.
‘‘It looked like part of a swamp that had been there for years. It was really bizarre.
‘‘Some people say 2011 was bad – but not like this.’’
Whittington estimated 10 to 15 trucks came and left with debris and dirt.
On Thursday, Austen Ward Heights resident Blair McKenzie and his neighbour lost the bottom corners of their sections in the Coster St slips, which started in the paddock beside them.
‘‘We walked round our section about 4pm and we thought everything was all good. An hour later it just took off.
‘‘Right where we had been walking was just gone and it went through the house below.
‘‘It has packed up all around the back side of it and broken through the kitchen window and gone into the house.’’
McKenzie said he was ‘‘gutted’’ and ‘‘shocked’’.
‘‘We have lost fences and a couple of tonnes of fill – it has disappeared down the hill.’’
He was told that if the slip neared their retaining walls, the family would need to evacuate.
Mark and Claire Broad live up the hill from the slip and said properties in the area were being evacuated.
‘‘It was a bit of a shock really. ‘‘You don’t really expect that in your backyard.’’
A 30-year-old wattle tree that threatened properties in Coster St was felled and taken down the hill.
Arborist Patrick Hill said the tree was ‘‘about to come down with the slip and go through the house’’.
Moana Ave has also been the site of a large slip.
For resident Jeremy Matthews it felt like groundhog day – Matthews saw two big slips in 2011 in the same location.
‘‘It has all the hallmarks of becoming as bad. We saw the slips coming down, we saw the trees going with them. Looking up the hill, this slip up here has already got bigger in the last half hour,’’ he said on Thursday afternoon.
During the last flood, there was a ‘‘river of mud coming down thigh deep’’ that approached the property.
‘‘Once it gets down into this hollow it is going to fill up like a bowl of minestrone. The geo-tech guys say that would push the whole lot down.
‘‘We are nervous as hell because once that mud gets into here . . . it came very, very close last time, it was literally minutes away and the diggers turned up in the middle of the night, about three o’clock in the morning.’’
Sarah Cooney lives above the slip in Coster St and said the contractors had been working very hard to clear the mud.
‘‘It is quite a shock to see how much comes down. They have taken so much away and there is still so much here.’’
While MetService said heavy rain had eased for the north and west of the South Island on Thursday night, it warned the heavy rain would return yesterday, with more flooding and slips possible.
‘‘You turn the tap off in the sky and everything else seems calmed down . . . Some people say 2011 was bad – but not like this.’’ Enner Glynn resident James Whittington