Kaikoura village home sweet home
Mark von Huben normally wears a tour guide’s hat while working in Kaikoura.
Nowadays he is behind the wheel of a dump truck carting rubble away from the massive slips blocking State Highway 1 north of the earthquake-stricken town.
The Christchurch tour guide says he upped sticks to ‘‘be involved in a small way’’ in Kaikoura after the magnitude-7.8 earthquake in November. He’s called the North Canterbury Transport Infrastructure Recovery (NCTIR) Accommodation Village home for three weeks.
‘‘It’s awesome, I love it, the food’s great, the hospitality’s great, everyone’s on the same wagon,’’ von Huben said.
The camp was multinational, attracting backpackers who would normally be involved in tourism and hospitality.
‘‘I’m actually somebody who’s away from home [with work] anyway and luckily I’ve got two teenage children, so it’s not too bad,’’ he said.
‘‘They’re at home this weekend and I’ll be heading down to catch up with them next weekend, because my son goes overseas for seven weeks.
‘‘A lot of the guys do return home when possible . . . there’s North Island crews here so they’ll look to have periods at home when they can.’’
Von Huben said he had a connection to Kaikoura, having married, lived and worked in the town.
‘‘I used to live and work here in tourism and other things in the mid-90s [and] I’m a transient worker,’’ he said.
The accommodation, which includes single rooms, a gym, a recreation room and a dining hall, currently houses 280 workers. It has capacity for 300. One of the key men behind the village is Kaikoura contractor Richard Fissenden.
Fissenden could be fixing his own ‘‘knackered’’ house, but instead helped build a village for 300 workers.
After the earthquake, electrical wires were strewn across Fissenden’s driveway from a felled power pole and his home had shifted and sunk.
A quarter-metre gap had opened up in front of his garage door.
Despite having plenty of rebuilding to do at his own property, Fissenden was on Sunday surveying the accommodation village he helped build.
‘‘We pretty much did a lot of the building of this camp – we carted in all the shingle, we did some of the minor earthworks and then we’re doing the road rebuilds around the place here and tidying everything up really,’’ he said.
The workload had been immense going by Fissenden ballooning staff numbers.
‘‘We’ve gone from about eight staff normally and we’ve got about 60 now, which is mostly all locals.
‘‘We’ve got a few guys of dairy farms that their farms are knackered and they can’t use them, so we’ve employed those guys and trained them up,’’ he said. The village was ‘‘fantastic’’. ‘‘If I was a single man this would be perfect.’’
His own house was ‘‘close to being a write-off’’, he said.
‘‘It sunk 150 millimetres and we haven’t actually done anything about it yet, we’ve sort of just been so busy working.
‘‘It’s just basically about trying to get the road open and keep the locals going really.’’