Rebuilding lives a tough job
Dealing with earthquake repairs has been a nightmare – not just for the Christchurch homeowners at the heart of it – but also for those on the frontline of their frustration. Nick Truebridge talks to a builder, a frustrated homeowner, an insurance giant a
THE BUILDER
Some of Sean Farrell’s employees have lived in broken homes – similar to those they’re fixing.
As the rebuild crawls along, Farrell Construction has taken a few hits from customers unhappy with the work it’s done.
But Farrell knows what it’s like. He himself is living in a rental. It’s his family’s fourth since the earthquakes, not an admission you expect to hear from the owner of IAG’s ‘‘top builder’’.
His employees, he says, have dealt with the same construction nightmares everyone else has.
‘‘Our guys live in the community. They’ve got kids, they’ve got houses, they’ve got everything else from the construction side of it.’’ As Farrell puts it, ‘‘they feel it’’. ‘‘I’m renting a house . . . I have a section which is all very nice, but my family is on their fourth rental.
‘‘Our guys are exactly the same, you know, still dealing with the everyday things that we deal with.
‘‘Our guys have got to feed families like everyone else, but they still try and do the right thing,’’ Farrell says.
We’re on the way to look at some of the company’s final fixes.
Farrell Construction has completed about 150 jobs in a ‘‘complex, challenging environment’’.
Farrell reckons Christchurch is the only place in the world where the repairs are handled the way they are.
He lists off four layers – the insurer, the project management office, the construction company and the homeowner.
‘‘Obviously no-one’s done it before, in New Zealand, and from our side of it we do some things really, really well and other things we don’t do so well.
‘‘But we put our hand up and we’ll go back and keep trying to do the right thing,’’ Farrell says.
It is more than five years since the earthquakes and Farrell does not believe anyone is where they thought they’d be.
‘‘If you looked back five years ago there was a huge momentum to really get things going and cleaned up,’’ Farrell recalls.
The company was approached by IAG to be its builder.
Farrell points out the company didn’t shy away from the challenge then, nor does it today.
‘‘As an organisation we still front up, our name’s still on the door. We haven’t come in and run away.’’
THE FRUSTRATED HOMEOWNER
Five years since the earthquakes, Margaret Edwards waits. She wants her Earthquake Commission (EQC) claim reviewed – a chartered engineer’s report says her repairs are not up to scratch.
‘‘It’s just totally different. In other words, they’ve just jacked and packed and it actually sagged the roof [for] the first lot [of repairs] that they did,’’ Edwards says.
Her warm, tidy South Brighton home ‘‘twisted’’ in the earthquakes.
‘‘They took the doors off, shaved them, I had to pay to have all the kitchen drawers all done by a cabinet maker because they wouldn’t slide in properly.’’
There were ‘‘umpteen’’ other issues with the home post-repair. So what’s the hold-up? ‘‘I don’t know. They don’t tell you. I’ve had three lots who have come and done exactly the same thing,’’ she says.
The elderly aren’t brought up to complain, Edwards says, but she’s decided to speak up.
‘‘The fact remains, how can I sell this house? I cannot guarantee to anybody, if I leave this house, that this has been done properly.’’
Adding to the stress, Canterbury Insurance Assistance Service facilitator Lorraine Guthrie says Edwards requested work on her house be halted while she was overseas.
‘‘But they just didn’t do it. It didn’t stop for three more days. They continued to do exactly what they agreed not to.’’
EQC says Edwards’ is one of 2325 dwellings that have had underfloor repairs reviewed.
‘‘While EQC acknowledges there may be some repairs needed to this dwelling, it does not agree with the findings of a structural report that has been commissioned by the customer.’’
Its geotech report found no evidence of significant subsidence.
‘‘In late June 2016, a meeting was held with the customer and EQC where it was agreed an independent engineer would undertake a full review of the structural damage.
‘‘This review is in the process of being commissioned, and once completed, EQC will update the customer on the repair approach.’’
THE INSURANCE GIANT
In Christchurch, Renee Walker is the public face of Insurance Australia Group Limited. IAG has copped its share of public floggings over the past five-plus years.
The insurance giant has been accused of reneging on contracts. Claims of bullying have been fired its way.
Walker was accused of spying on a Facebook group of TC3 residents. So what has the company’s agenda been in postearthquake Canterbury?
Walker strongly maintains that it’s here to help. She is general manager of customer reinstatement. Her initial contract was for 12 months.
She’s been in the job more than five years.
‘‘We’re here to help people rebuild their lives and that’s through claims settlement and whether the claims settlement is reinstating their home for them . . . Or negotiating a cash settlement figure.’’
So why do we hear of all the things the company does wrong?
‘‘I would say we’re in a low-trust environment. So people are coming at things from a very defensive position, so you go into a lot of conversations and they start off defensive.
‘‘I think people expect a fight when they go into a negotiation . . . We are all here for the same thing, but somewhere along the line it’s become such a fight,’’ Walker says.
That’s because so many unresolved homeowners are ‘‘frustrated’’ and ‘‘tired’’ of their situation.
Walker points out she was one of them.
‘‘My own home was a total loss. I then bought a house that repairs were ‘done on’ – or the builder was paid for repairs but they didn’t actually do it,’’ she says.
‘‘I really hope now, five years on, nearly six years on for some people, we should be moving from that frustration and just dealing with your claim to actually living in a city that’s been rebuilt.
‘‘Our phase of this recovery should be just about done, or is just about done. We’re 93.8 per cent of the way through.’’
The vast majority of customers have been easy to deal with and appreciative of the company’s work in Canterbury, Walker says, but she adds those who aren’t, don’t refrain from letting her know.
‘‘I’ve taken a lot of criticism personally – I’ve had people asked me how do I sleep at night, why do I work for an insurer?’’
Some homeowners, she says, have ‘‘wildly divergent’’ ideas of what a fair settlement should look like.
‘‘I’ve always said that people are going to hate insurers at the beginning . . . We had so many people we needed to respond to, we couldn’t respond to everyone quickly and people needed someone to blame.’’
THE SUBCONTRACTOR
The earthquakes produced a market never seen before, Red Electrical’s Scott Aldridge says.
‘‘Through the repair programme we got our teeth into the earthquake market . . . That forced us to grow from a one-man band to a team of 10 inside a year.
‘‘So you’re dealing with, as each month of the year rolled on, you’re dealing with increasingly frustrated homeowners that were at their tether from the word go.’’
It was a ‘‘huge challenge’’ for all involved, Aldridge says.
For him, the repair programme is a ‘‘sunset industry’’. He’s almost completely out of it now.
‘‘But, as I said before, it’s such a new and unique set of situations that nobody can anticipate how long these repairs would take.
‘‘You’ve got properties getting repaired with strategies that hadn’t been used in New Zealand before [and] seldom used globally,’’ he says.
Aldridge and his family were out of their home for six weeks.
He acknowledges that was a short period compared with those his company worked for. ‘‘For myself personally you really had to be mindful of that. We didn’t have anything compared to the idea of families with young children being in a rental property in a different part of town . . . and have their entire lifestyle upturned.’’