‘Brushed off’: Their properties are marked ‘very high hazard’, so why did no one contact them?

Sunday, 15 March 2026

On a quiet street in the North Shore suburb of Bayview, a tranquil setting conceals the anxiety of the neighbourhood’s homeowners.

Late last year they discovered their properties, which face a bush reserve edged by a stream and visited by tūī and kererū, lie in a floodplain categorised as “very high hazard”.

One affected owner, Marty Jaynes, said the neighbours got together to try to understand how a stream that had never flooded in the 30 years some of them have lived there, even withstanding the deluge of the 2023 Auckland Anniversary rain event, could now be a very high hazard flood area.

“They’re worried about the implications now that this risk is on the LIM, that insurance premiums could go up, that there will be extra hoops to jump through if they want to do anything to their homes,” Jaynes said.

“It was quite a shock, they [Auckland Council] did say this is the worst-case scenario, but that’s not what people see when they read a LIM.”

The neighbours put their collective concerns over the accuracy of the modelling to the council. They asked for an on-site assessment, a re-evaluation of the hazard classification, and clear information on the data source used.

Jaynes said they received a generic response: “We felt brushed off.”

Neighbour Bjoern Pauly said the council’s “blanket response” ignored their specific queries and was “not very helpful at all”.

With a young family and dreams of extending his home, Pauly said the updated flood information “gives a lot of uncertainty, and a bundle of nervousness about insurance”.

The council’s own description of the flood hazard areas says they are indicative, based on large-scale modelling studies and require site-specific confirmation.

“Why isn’t the council sending someone out?” said Pauly, who also questioned why the neighbours were not notified when a “very high risk” categorisation was applied to their properties.

“You would think, if you are living now in a high hazard zone, that someone should say, ‘look, this is what you need to do’. What does it mean? Do you have to evacuate in advance?

“It feels like a red sticker has been placed on my house,” Pauly said.

In its response, Auckland Council’s stormwater department, Healthy Waters, said it was not required to publicly notify when updated hazard information becomes available in any given catchment, but it was required to ensure the information was available to the public.

The Bayview neighbours aren’t the only ones facing daunting flood hazard labels on their homes. According to Auckland Council, around 65,000 buildings are in floodplains predicted to be covered by floodwater in a 1-in-100-year event.

Homeowners in other parts of Auckland have described their efforts to understand and correct floodplain and flood prone hazard labels they feel are incorrect. Readers have contacted Stuff from other parts of the country with similar concerns.

In Tauranga, homeowners have been able to get flood hazard information updated since the Environment Court issued an order in March 2025, following appeals relating to Tauranga City Council’s Plan Change 27.

The order lays out that a site-specific technical report will prevail over the city council’s indicative flood hazard areas.

As councils across the country face the immense tasks of responding to natural hazards and planning for future development, why is there not a standardised process for informing homeowners of hazard risk changes, how the modelling was arrived at and how the result can be appealed?

Minister of Housing and RMA Reform Chris Bishop said he wants property owners to have clear, up-to-date information about natural hazard risks for their properties, and new rules require councils to provide easy-to-understand hazard information in LIMs, including details like report age and scope.

Are you impacted by natural hazard modelling? Email erin.johnson@stuffdigital.co.nz

Initiatives underway, such as the National Adaptation Framework, New Zealand’s Flood Map, and the new planning system are designed to help councils and property owners better understand the natural hazard risks affecting properties, Bishop said.

“The new planning system will introduce clearer rules for identifying natural hazards, ensuring that councils across New Zealand take a consistent approach to managing them.”

Minister of Local Government Simon Watts said the national flood map will unify national and local data.

“It will provide a trusted source of flood risk information for the whole country. We are working towards having the first generation of the map ready within the next year,” Watts said.

“Currently, New Zealand doesn’t have a single view of the data. This flood map is the first step. Over time we expect the quality, consistency and coverage of the data will continue to improve.”

Andrew Chin, Auckland Council’s head of strategic initiatives at Healthy Waters, acknowledged the concerns that flood hazard information is not specific enough to owners’ properties.

That is because the council’s online Flood Viewer and GeoMaps maps are created at regional and catchment levels, for planning purposes and to inform needs across the whole region.

“They are not created at a site-specific level,” Chin said.

“It is not the council’s role to obtain site-specific flood hazard information for private properties in Auckland - and it’s not realistic for us to do so, either.

“What we want property owners and future property owners to understand is the role of the flood maps on Flood Viewer, GeoMaps and LIM reports.”

That includes understanding that the maps identify potential hazards across the region, and may help determine if further investigation is needed, he said.

“The maps can be considered alongside other information such as site-specific reports, which are likely to provide more detail about the nature and extent of any hazard.

“While we understand the frustration of dealing with potential future risks in the present, like all councils across the country, flood information on our LIMs must include the impact of climate change on the potential hazards that it identifies.

“It’s important to remember that the information is used not just by current property owners, but prospective homeowners and residents, too.”

After being contacted by Stuff, Chin confirmed that his team will arrange a meeting with Jaynes, Pauly and their neighbours.