Waiau’s slow road to recovery
There are undoubtedly still headaches for the people of the Hurunui district but Mayor Winton Dalley says morale is better than expected. The council has just completed a productive round of meetings for the public to hear from insurance companies, banks and the Earthquake Commission, or meet one-on-one with builders, engineers and architects who are thin on the ground in the Hurunui.
Across the district the damaged buildings are spread across about half of the the Hurunui district’s 9000 square kilometres, Dalley says.
‘‘It’s a massive geographic area and a very sparsely spread population... The percentage of people [affected] here is probably larger than it was in the Canterbury quake. While the numbers may be small the effect on the community is pretty massive.’’
Ministries dragged the chain, Dalley says. Local businesses felt they had to fight to get access to the Government’s wage subsidy package, ‘‘where it seemed to be something that Kaiko¯ ura had as of right’’.
Underinsurance is also a small but significant problem. Only about 10 per cent of building claims for earthquake damage are for more than $100,000, and then only some of those will be total losses. But those properties are now sum-insured rather than covered for full replacement. Nowhere was underinsurance felt more keenly in Waiau than the pub. The building was insured, but the policy had no natural disaster coverage. The stricken, century-old building still sits, redstickered, behind protective fencing.
There are 12 separate types of damage keeping the sticker in place, publican Michelle Beri says. She and fellow publican Lindsay Collins are confident they have remedied six of them, but the remaining half will be difficult: repairing lintels, replacing windows. One chimney still needs to be secured, which means having to pay for scaffolding, money they don’t have.
But the community is holding together. Everyone in Waiau, and across Waiau, seems to laud its spirit. There is an underdog quality to it. A town with a population of under 300 that lost its pub, historic cottage, bowling green, church, swimming pool and nearly half of its school roll forging ahead in spite of it all. It collectively bristles at every reference to the ‘‘Kaikoura’’ earthquake. The epicentre was just 5km from Waiau. As the official T-shirts in the pub say: ‘‘It’s Waiau’s Fault.’’