Residents shocked as hillside slips down drive
Thursday, 18 August 2022
After a nervous night in the Nelson suburb of Enner Glynn, resident James Whittington woke feeling happy that his neighbours’ houses were still in the same place that they were when the sun went down.
“We survived the night,” the Coster St resident said on Friday morning.
A series of slips from a paddock above the street slid down a steep driveway, breaking the kitchen window of a neighbouring house and entering the home.
The first slip, which came down on Thursday morning, was cleared by contractors only to see a second and third slip come down afterwards.
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The slips ended close to Whittington's property. He stayed at home to clear the drains periodically.
“My sense of normalcy is still in place,” he said on Friday morning. While the weather was “soupy” and foggy, without the rain it was “amazing”, he said.
“You turn the tap off in the sky and everything else seems calmed down”.
On Thursday afternoon Whittington watched the drama unfold. While other residents were evacuating, he was staying put to clear drains where possible.
He said he saw reeds from the paddock on the hill that “just floated down” the driveway with the mud and were sitting upright.
“It looked like part of a swamp that had been there for years. It was really bizarre.”
“Some people say 2011 was bad - but not like this.”
Whittington estimated 10 to 15 trucks came and left with debris and dirt.
On Thursday, Austen Ward Heights resident Blair McKenzie and his neighbour lost the bottom corners of the section in the Coster St slips, which started in the paddock beside them.
“We walked round our section at about 4pm and and we thought everything was all good. An hour later it just took off.
“Right where we had been walking was just gone, and it went through the house below.
“It’s packed up all around the backside of it and broken through the kitchen window and gone into the house.”
McKenzie said he was “gutted” and “shocked”.
“We’ve lost fences and a couple of tons of fill - it’s disappeared down the hill.”
He was told that if the slip neared their retaining walls the family would need to evacuate.
Mark and Claire Broad live up the hill from the slip and said properties in the area were being evacuated.
“It was a bit of a shock really. You don’t really expect that in your backyard.”
A 30-year-old wattle tree that threatened properties on Coster St was felled and taken down the hill. Arborist Patrick Hill said the tree was “about to come down with the slip and go through the house.”
Moana Ave has also been the site of a large slip.
For resident Jeremy Matthews it felt like groundhog day – Matthews saw two big slips in 2011 in the same location.
“It has all the hallmarks of becoming as bad. We saw the slips coming down, we saw the trees going with them, looking up the hill, this slip up here has already got bigger in the last half hour,” he said on Thursday afternoon.
During the last flood, there was a “river of mud coming down thigh deep” that approached the property.
“Once it gets down into this hollow it’s going to fill up like a bowl of minestrone. The geo-tech guys say that would push the whole lot down.
“We’re nervous as hell because once that mud gets into here … it became very, very close last time, it was literally minutes away and the diggers turned up in the middle of the night about three o’clock in the morning.”
Sarah Cooney lives above the slip on Coster St and said the contractors had been working very hard to clear the mud.
“It’s quite a shock to see how much comes down. They’ve taken so much away and there’s still so much here.”
While MetService said heavy rain had eased for the north and west of the South Island on Thursday night, it has warned the heavy rain will return on Friday, with more flooding and slips possible.