Living in yard after storm
All 35 Buller homes red-stickered after ex-Cyclone Fehi remain uninhabitable three months on.
Paula Dobbs owns one of them.
Her Snodgrass Rd, Westport home is still too wet to rebuild so she is renting a bach nearby.
‘‘It’s slow. We had so much water for so long. We had the building inspector in [Tuesday] and our moisture levels are still at 22 per cent. It needs to be at 17 or lower to rebuild. So we are still waiting,’’ she said.
On Gladstone St, Pauline Williamson and her family have lived in a motel since the February 1 storm sent ‘‘half a metre of water through the house’’.
They moved back onto the section on Monday, but the house was still off the cards.
‘‘We went through emergency housing so we’ve just been given a relocatable two-bed unit put on our back section so we can move out of the motel,’’ she said.
Building inspectors declared the house dry so she was waiting for building work to begin.
‘‘Everything has been approved by the insurance and I’ve picked out my new kitchen so I’m hoping it won’t take too much longer,’’ she said.
Snodgrass Rd resident Marcus Shenker is still living in a motel.
Contractors had lifted up old linoleum in the kitchen before cleaners had finished drying the property so asbestos got blown all over his home, he said. ‘‘They sent over a woman from Christchurch who put on a full suit and breathing apparatus and her tests came back 10 out of 10 in every room in the house,’’ he said.
He expected a one-bedroom portacom unit to be delivered yesterday so he could move back onto his section. Builders had estimated it would be another two months until he could move back into his home.
Buller District Council building inspectors red-stickered 35 houses following the February 1 storm and yellow-stickered a further 29.
Senior building inspector Richard Knudsen said most of the houses were in Westport and others at Snodgrass, Charleston and Granity.
The red sticker meant residents could not live in the property until it was dry and sanitary.
Electrical and sewerage systems had to be checked.
Most residents had received temporary accommodation, initially either in motels or rental accommodation and then temporary housing on their sections while work was carried out.
Knudsen said residents had to replace gib up to 300 millimetres above the flood level and inspectors had to ensure inside the walls were dry before they could be re-lined. He said older rimu frames took longer to dry than newer homes.
‘‘Most of the houses have been cleared to be re-lined. That’s where our involvement stops, but I have requested a record of works from the builders when they are finished to make sure our records are up-to-date on when the renovations have been completed,’’ he said.
Provisional figures by the Insurance Council reveal exCyclone Fehi cost $38.5 million nationwide and ex-tropical Cyclone Gita on February 20 cost a further $28.3m. A falling out between friends has culminated in one man being ordered pay the other $80,000, despite working without pay for his company for nearly seven years.
George Cowan was gifted a section of land in Winton, near Invercargill, by Frank Kidd, a partner in Kidd Partnership, and lived rent-free on properties he owned or was developing after his marriage ended – an arrangement Kidd thought was agreed compensation for his work.
Six years in, Cowan approached Kidd for wages, sparking an ‘‘acrimonious’’ dispute the Employment Relations Authority (ERA) considered might have caused his heart attack, but did not lead to an unjustified dismissal.
In his determination, authority member James Crichton said it was difficult to calculate compensation for Cowan, who had no contract, agreed hours of work or pay rate. He ordered Kidd Partnership to pay $20,000 – the equivalent of 6341 hours at minimum wage, minus the value of Cowan’s accommodation – believing its breaches were ‘‘inadvertent’’ and not motivated by ‘‘wickedness’’. Cowan was ordered to pay $80,000, the value of the gifted land.