Section turned into muddy hell
‘‘All you could see was this hillside – everything gone off it, everything: the planting, the trees, the cabbage trees, everything. I couldn’t stop crying.’’
Anna Loveridge
A Christchurch woman cried after a contractor she trusted dug up her hillside section, allegedly leaving it unstable and requiring more than $100,000 in works to remediate.
Anna Loveridge hired Stone Lake Contracting to remove foliage from behind two retaining walls and clear a driveway leading to a build platform on her vacant,
2000 square metre Redcliffs property.
She said she told its director, Jason Finlay, her budget was
$5000. On October 16, the day she believes work commenced at the Augusta St site, Loveridge left for Auckland to visit family for her birthday.
When she returned to Christchurch, she found sewerage and stormwater lines had been removed and hundreds of cubic metres of soil had been displaced, leaving a ‘‘massive unstable hillside and drive that will collapse in the rain’’.
‘‘All you could see was this hillside – everything gone off it, everything: the planting, the trees, the cabbage trees, everything. I couldn’t stop crying,’’ Loveridge said.
‘‘I wound up in hospital last week. I thought I was having a heart attack – it wasn’t, but it was anxiety. I’m so stressed.’’
Finlay disagreed with Loveridge’s account and declined to comment further, but referred The Press to a spokeswoman who also refused to comment.
The section had lain empty since 2012 when Loveridge’s former home was demolished after being damaged in the Canterbury earthquakes.
She held on to the property and later bought a house directly above it on the hillside as an interim measure.
Her intention in clearing the foliage was to prepare the site for a new house, modelled on the original, which she hoped to build next year.
Plans had already been drawn up, and she was hoping a settlement from her insurer would come through before Christmas.
Loveridge said she trusted Finlay. She had seen the work he had done for a neighbour, laying a power cable on an easement through her section, and had hired him to do work at the property where she was living.
She was first alerted to the situation when a neighbour sent her a photo on October 16 which appeared to show the retaining walls at the section were gone, and the build platform was covered in piles of dirt.
She arrived back in Christchurch on the night of October 26 when she stayed with a friend.
The next day, she received a call from the Christchurch City Council to say they had received a complaint about her section.
When she saw the site for the first time Loveridge ‘‘couldn’t stop crying’’.
‘‘Large cliffs had been carved into the hillside’’ and ‘‘dirt dumped on all the native planting’’. It was unsuitable to build on, and would set back her plans to rebuild her home, she said.
The sewerage and stormwater lines servicing the house where she was living and that of a neighbouring property had been removed and had not been reinstated.
Ariane Hollis-Locke, the owner of the neighbouring property, said Loveridge alerted her family to the situation as they no longer lived in the house. Hollis-Locke sent a letter to Finlay asking him to restore the utilities at his own cost last Monday, but had not heard anything back.
Loveridge said Stone Lake Contracting had offered to provide a portaloo for her house and said they would reconnect the sewerage.
However, communication between the parties had since broken down as Loveridge said Finlay was ‘‘refusing to engage’’ despite offers of mediation.
On November 6, the council issued a $300 infringement notice for earthworks exceeding the permissible limit without resource consent.
Loveridge, who had not been living at her house since, had also had to apply for a retrospective resource consent and submit remediation plans to the council. This had cost $2000, a fee she wanted Finlay to cover.
Making the section stable and restoring the build platform would require major earthworks, including the use of matting to layer into the clay.
Loveridge said she had been given a quote for about $119,000 for the necessary works.
She believed Finlay, as the person who carried out the original work, should do the earthworks required in the remediation.
‘‘I’m happy to come to the table and talk about it. I’ve always said that since day one but he’s refused to do it. I just want him to sort it out.’’