Tenant has lucky escape as sleepout tumbles with landslip
A person has reportedly had a lucky escape after wild weather tore apart a South Island home and sent a sleepout plunging down a slope.
The sleepout on Stansell Ave in Nelson is now lying in pieces more than 20m down the steep hillside.
Civil Defence controller Alec Louverdis said yesterday 411 homes in the region had been evacuated due to river flooding, including 113 after landslides on Thursday night.
It is understood the Stansell Ave sleepout came down in the early hours of Thursday.
Neighbour John van Gosliga said a tenant had been living in the sleepout up until two weeks ago, at which point he shifted into a nearby room on the same property.
He was in that nearby room when the sleepout tumbled down the slope, van Gosliga said.
“If it happened two weeks ago, he would have been history.”
He had since helped the tenant move out of the property. No one else was home when the slip hit.
Van Gosliga was confident his own home had not been affected but said there were concerns another house, closer to the damaged home, had been undermined by the slip.
There were three homes further down the slope that could also be potentially affected if other parts of the damaged property fell from above on to them, he said.
In fine weather, Stansell Ave is one of the most beautiful in Nelson, offering clifftop sea views.
However, van Gosliga said there had been drainage issues on the street and 11 years ago there was another big rain event that also caused a slip near the latest one.
Some Nelson residents were still being kept out of their homes last night as “devastating” wild weather lashed the top of the South Island.
Louverdis of Civil Defence estimated roughly 1200 people were still displaced from their homes in Nelson overnight.
He said the damage he saw on Thursday was “heartbreaking” and the city was “years” away from a recovery.