Tornado rebuild problems
Vandals have been dumping rubbish and pillaging homes damaged in the South Auckland tornado, leaving property owners frustrated as they attempt to rebuild.
Many of the houses wrecked when a twister tore through Papatoetoe in June are still surrounded by scaffolding.
Some have partially repaired roofs, while others don’t look much different from the day the storm hit.
This is especially obvious at one end of Fitzroy St where there are still empty houses with boarded-up windows, and two two-storey blocks of flats that have been stripped bare.
While there are fences surrounding the block, neighbours told Stuff they had seen people sneaking in, partying and sometimes dumping rubbish.
‘‘One day I saw a random ute pull up and the guy just left a bunch of tyres,’’ a woman across the street from the flats said.
The pile of between 20 and 25 tyres was still there last week and Amandeep Bath Singh, who owns a number of the units, said it had been a nearly year-long headache of frustrations and delays.
‘‘We have had issues of people just taking things that were there,’’ she said.
People had snuck in and stolen everything from heat pumps to bathroom taps, she said.
‘‘There is not really much we can do about it,’’ she said.
‘‘We can’t just sit outside all day and keep an eye on it.’’
She said she was waiting on approval for the rebuild to come through from Auckland Council, with many aspects held up by delays in processing insurance claims, as well as Covid-19 lockdowns.
Not far away in Hayward Rd, Scott Booker said he too had seen rubbish and tyres dumped on nearby properties.
Throughout the rebuild of his family home, which lost its roof and many of its windows, people had been filling up his builder’s skips in the middle of the night.
‘‘It wasn’t just a bit, they were filling it up to the top,’’ he said.
They too had been hit by delays and only finished the rebuild in January.
A lot of the windows and roofing accessories had to be shipped in from overseas and were held up by the long delays at ports caused by Covid-19. In Puhinui Rd, Evan Reece and his mother had to live without power for months following the tornado because of an argument with their insurance company.
As for Singh, she said she just had to ride out the delays as there was not much that could be done.
‘‘It might just be easier to sell it off than face the stress of rebuilding,’’ Singh said.
The freak tornado left 63 homes uninhabitable and one person dead.
In its last update in August, the Insurance Council called it New Zealand’s costliest tornado.
At the time, insurance companies had paid out $32 million in claims – $24 million was paid to residential customers.