Three to six months for 95% of flood-damaged Auckland homes to be fully reinstated, says Suncorp

Wednesday, 1 February 2023

A flood has hit Auckland for the second time in days, with houses and streets underwater. (Video February 2023)

Insurer Suncorp expects 95% of flood-damaged Auckland homes to be fully reinstated within three to six months.

Suncorp, which owns Vero and has a majority stake in AA Insurance, has so far had more than 3000 claims after torrential rain and flooding hit Auckland and other parts of the upper North Island.

The work to reinstate homes has already begun.

“We’re saying six months probably for the worst. Three to six months is the timeframe we are putting on for the reinstatement of 95% of them,” said Steve Booth, who is heading Suncorp’s operational response to the floods.

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Steve Booth heads up Suncorp’s operational response to “major loss events”.

After flooding in Westport in July 2021, it took more than a year for some homes to be repaired, and some remain empty to this day. Booth said those that had not yet been made habitable were not insured by Suncorp.

Suncorp managed the repairs for people it insured, unless they opted to take a cash settlement, he said.

Every managed repair done by Suncorp in Westport was finished by February last year, Booth said, and he expected a similar timeline in Auckland.

“We have to strip them, and dry them out, because we have to get back to a dry standard for the frames. Sometimes we can just open the window and let nature do its stuff.”

But other times homes had to be sealed, and dehumidifiers brought in. “It could be a month to get a house dry.”

The availability of contractors and building supplies also affected how long it took to reinstate homes.

Henderson resident Lina Anderson's Kāinga Ora house was inundated by floodwaters.

Booth has spent time at the “epicentres” of the flooding in Auckland, where creeks became rivers in minutes, overspilling their banks, and inundating land, and homes.

One was the area in Milford around the Wairau Creek. Another was in Swanson and Henderson in Auckland’s west, where he says the Henderson Creek Te Wai o Pareira temporarily became the “Henderson River”.

But flooding was widespread, including parts of South Auckland. Throughout the central suburbs of Auckland there were pockets of flooding in low-lying parts of Parnell, and Epsom.

Slips and flood damage around Maritime Terrace Birkenhead and Little Shoal Bay

“There’s a tipping point. Communities will handle a certain amount of rain. I always think 20 to 25 mm of rain an hour. Most of the infrastructure will handle that, but when it gets up to three times [that] no drains will handle it. It has to do something, so it ponds, it pools. It floods houses,” Booth said.

Suncorp has been talking to customers and triaging them.

“We want to know who needs help quickly,” Booth said. “Are they vulnerable. Are they elderly?”

Vulnerable people with flooded homes, or people who were unable to remain in their homes, had been top of the response list.

“You get in there quick,” he said. “We need to know they’ve got somewhere to live, that they’re adequately funded. We need to start removing their possessions and putting them into storage.”

Emergency repairs on things like broken windows and roofs were done immediately, without assessors having to go to insured homes first, Booth said.

The aim was to reduce further damage, and to make homes liveable.

Australian claims assessors have become skilled in flood responses after repeated extreme weather events there. In this photo taken in October 2022, a resident walks out of his flood-hit home in the suburb of Maribyrnong in Victoria, Australia.

“But if someone says I’ve had a metre of water through my kitchen, lounge and garage, and I can’t live in the home, that gets flagged as having to be seen now,” he said.

All of those urgent ones were being talked to daily, and had either now been seen, or had been locked in to be seen.

He had seen heartwarming scenes of human kindness and community spirt, including teams of volunteers helping people clear water and debris from homes.

“Make sure you keep a record of who was here, and for how long, because we’ll contribute to the cost of doing this,” he said.

Many policyholders’ insurance paid for them to live elsewhere while their homes were being reinstated.

Many people whose home were uninhabitable had been taken in by friends and relatives, but Booth said: “We still pay them. We don’t insist you go to a motel.”

Some people were settled with relatively large sums of money to pay for alternative accommodation. Some got “creative”, and decided to buy a caravan or a motorhome to live in temporarily.

Claims assessors had flown in from around the country, and from Australia, Booth said. “We’ve got people from Christchurch, Wellington, Melbourne, Sydney. They’re all coming over here,” he said.

More Australians were arriving on Wednesday.

Tradespeople were also being brought to Auckland.

“We’re bringing in builders from the Bay of Plenty, the Waikato,” Booth said.

The worst-hit by the storms have seen significant land damage around their homes.

The Earthquake Commission Toka Tū Ake insures land damage, and Suncorp, as an agent of EQC, must follow its processes, Booth said.

Booth has coordinated responses for Suncorp since 2003, but the first natural disaster he experienced as an insurance professional was in 1988.

“I cut my teeth on Cyclone Bola,” said Booth, who is now 66.

Bola swept through the top of the North island, and caused flooding in Auckland.

Since then, natural disasters he had helped coordinate Suncorp’s response to included the Canterbury and Kaikōura earthquakes, the Timaru hailstorm of 2019 and multiple flood events including Westport in 2021, and Nelson in 2022.