The full story of the Loafers Lodge blaze

Friday, 19 May 2023

On Tuesday morning, the country woke to news of one of New Zealand’s worst fires, after an inferno at Wellington’s Loafers Lodge. Mike White and Nikki Macdonald tell the story of what happened that night, how some escaped death, and how a community and city are trying to cope.

The evening of the Loafers Lodge fire, about the time dew started to settle on Newtown’s streets, close to 40 people gathered at a local church.

Some sat on the floor, some on chairs with cushions crafted from coffee sacks, as they hugged, and gently sang together.

**READ MORE:

* 'Debris piled high': Police remove two bodies at fatal Loafers Lodge fire scene

* Former Loafers Lodge tenants remember frequent false alarms, limited access to stairs

* Spotlight on building rules, fire crew resourcing following Wellington fatal fire

**

The tiny chapel of St Thomas’s, beside a garish McDonald’s drive-through, had always been a community hub, a place where the suburb’s homeless and vulnerable sourced solace and hope.

The Night Prayer had been quickly organised by priest Mark Johnson in the wake of the fire that killed at least six people, and left many without possessions or a place to live.

These were people Johnson and his congregation knew. Friends.

People they saw most days on Newtown’s streets, where autumn’s leaves stuck to the pavements, and rough sleepers curled up in doorways and alleyways.

People who came to the church’s family breakfast every Sunday, where helpers laid tablecloths and flowers, and then took orders from anyone who wanted to come.

People whose names and lives they knew.

At the end of the service, Johnson, a bearded former-Minneapolis streetie, told those gathered what he’d seen in the fire’s aftermath, and how the Loafers Lodge residents were faring.

Outside, a regular on the streets picked and plinked and slapped discordantly at a banjo.

Johnson couldn’t help but smile. Something there hadn’t been much of that Tuesday.

There’s nothing to mark out fire incident F3740972 as special or different.

Logged at 12.25am on the morning of May 16, it’s simply the second of 65 incident reports from the Fire Service’s central region that day. The duration is listed as 0 minutes and the result field is blank.

In fact, there were multiple 111 calls clamouring for help at a blaze on Newtown’s Adelaide Rd. Some came from people trapped inside the hostel, which was spewing smoke and fire, the flames surging from its top windows and roof fusing to turn the building into a lidless ball of orange.

On the first floor, Simon Hanify knocked furiously on doors to alert his neighbours, after smelling smoke in the corridor. He almost ignored the squealing alarm, after another one came to nothing two hours earlier. They were so frequent people often just rolled over and went back to sleep, assuming it was just some rogue smoking in bed.

On the second floor, people woke as smoke slid under their doors, and made a dash for the stairs.

On the third floor, which housed at least one convicted arsonist, Raymond Lauder ran through the corridors screaming “fire, fire” after seeing smoke spilling from two bedrooms. He’d come down from his fourth floor room for a cuppa.

Within seconds, the hallway went from a foot of thick black smoke, to a foot of air. At the exit, a man lay on the ground holding open the stairwell door, willing his neighbours to safety.

Anthony Harris worried whether he was OK, and put a mask on him as he hurried past.

The fourth floor of the converted 1971 warehouse is a mezzanine nestled under the asbestos roof. Those rooms had no external windows – only skylights opening to the roof. The roof that later collapsed.

Five minutes after the desperate 111 calls, the first two fire trucks arrived from Newtown’s station 1.3km away, up towards the city’s zoo.

The station’s long ladder truck was out of action (again), so they sent its shorter stand-in, with a 17m arm that would not reach over the hostel roof.

In bureaucratic fire speak, the blaze was already “well-involved” when they arrived.

For the non-bureaucratic humans heading into the building as its residents desperately tried to get out, that meant intense heat and black billowing poison that made it near impossible to see.

Like most fire scenes, it was chaotic. But this wasn’t most fire scenes. The majority of firefighters go their whole career without working a fatal fire, let alone one described as “as bad as it gets”.

At some point on the race up the stairs to rescue residents, the officer in charge made a call no firefighter ever wants to make - that the next floor was a floor too far. We’ve already lost two firefighters this year in the Muriwai slip. No-one wanted to lose any more.

Nine minutes after the Newtown fire trucks arrived, a long-ladder truck pulled in from Thorndon, just across town. Its 32m extension could reach the roof, where five residents had somehow escaped to.

“For fire safety reasons the number of people on the roof shall not exceed 50 persons at any time,” warns the sign on the hostel’s rooftop terrace. Little did they know the roof would become the fire escape.

Tala Sili also ended up on a roof. Faced with an impassable, smoke-choked hallway, he opened his window, hung over the side and jumped, spraining his ankle as he landed. Ambulance and fire crews got him down with a ladder.

“It was really scary, but I knew I had to jump out the window or just burn inside the building,” he later said.

Where the five roof rescuees came from isn’t clear, but they made it to safety. Others did not.

While the firefighters’ efforts saved many, any loss of life leaves you raw, as Fire and Emergency chief executive Kerry Gregory later said. “It’s really tough. You question yourself. Could I have done anything different?”

By 2.30am the inferno was under control, barring a few flare-ups. By mid-morning, the incident report’s blank result field was beginning to be filled in.

St Thomas’s church helpers walked and scooted the streets, scouting for familiar faces. Each find was a name to shift happily from missing to safe on the list of lodge residents.

Alongside the shunned and vulnerable staying at the hostel were hospital cleaners and admin workers, meat workers and migrant nurses, former refugees and nine people under Corrections electronic monitoring.

The numbers were still sketchy, as they always are in the early hours of a disaster.

But of the 94 people believed to be living in the 92-room hostel, 52 were definitely safe. And six were definitely dead.

As people in Newtown learnt of the fire, it brought out the kindest and most callous in people.

Strangers brought baking to Newtown Park where the survivors had been taken. A barista bemoaned road closures meant it was taking ages for people to get onto the motorway.

Though Loafers is officially on the Mt Cook side of the suburban divide, everyone associated it with Newtown, even its residents.

Newtown. Where shops advertised $1 soft drinks; where the anarchist bookshop had a sign outside with a Hemingway quote encouraging direct action; where tenants action group posters were daubed on lampposts (“Landlords: Stop Flat Inspections”); where a park bench was tagged “LIFE PASTA FREEDOM”, where Jimmy’s Fruit Mart, just a few blocks from death, looked bright and colourful with its streetside flowers and vegetables.

A few hundred metres from the fire scene, opposite Wellington’s hospital, Paul sat at a bus stop reading a religious tract, and fingering a plastic rosary.

His aim was to share the suffering of others and be loving, he said, pointing across the road to those climbing the hospital’s steps. “This place is needy, you know.”

Paul, with his black beanie and red rosaries, was one corner of a triangle of suffering that morning, well aware of what had happened hours earlier at Loafers.

“We’re a troubled nation, sometimes.”

Where Riddiford St and Adelaide Rd collided with John St, Fulton Hogan workers laid out orange cones, and plastic tape was strung between corners, separating people shopping at Countdown, from flashing lights and high-vis clad firefighters and the horrors everyone knew lay on the lodge’s burnt-out top floor.

Loafers Lodge announced itself with looping, cursive writing on a billboard attached to one wall. It seemed oddly extravagant, hinting at style, at odds with the reality its residents were beginning to speak of: a hostel of last resort, rooms of immeasurable modesty.

On the building’s front, with its charred and scarred top storey and smashed windows, smoke still emerged in wisps. Around the back, a Samoan flag hung limp in one window and a maroon towel dangled from another, left there to dry by a resident, now abandoned with all their other possessions.

A Fire Service ute parked outside. “Never underestimate the speed of fire,” its signwriting reminded people.

A Mercedes van with dark windows arrived, the prime minister and other politicians wearing suits and serious faces emptying from it to inspect the scene.

Up the road, a small cluster of people gathered outside St Thomas’s – or St Tom’s as it’s shorthanded.

A woman drank tea from a china mug patterned with flowers, and talked with others about what happened at Loafers.

One of the group, Joseph, had stayed there in the past. Look, he said, pulling an envelope from his backpack and unfolding a letter from the lodge, as proof.

“It’s shit, bro. It didn’t have a fan, it doesn’t have no healthy things. Why should I lie to you about it – coz we lost our bros.”

He’d paid $320 a week, including wifi, but said the lodge had been left to run down, with those with no options and little hope sent there: people from prison; deportees; those with serious health problems.

“They give you the key, and set you up to fail.”

He said he’d been beaten up there; been intimidated, been charged for busting something that was already broken.

So in early May, Joseph left.

For the last two weeks he’d been living in his car.

“It’s safe.”

His room had been on the third floor, and it was easy to imagine what might have happened if he’d been there the previous night.

“God saved me.

“Almighty,” he exulted, pointing to the sky. The same sky which hours earlier had been filled with smoke, and desperate cries from desperate people.

By evening, traffic had been allowed down Riddiford St, and past the hospital, but was then diverted past the fire scene, sweeping away up John St.

Those on their way home perhaps got a glimpse of the lodge, before being distracted by other things. A young man seemingly contemplating the scene turned out to be simply puzzling the path to Jetts 24-hour gym on the other side of the cordon.

Nobody lingered.

But that was perhaps how it had always been: Somewhere we knew wasn’t good, but easier to turn away from, because we didn’t want to think too hard about it, or because we had no answer to the problems distilled within its walls.

The next day, a survivor named Chris arrived at the cordon, clutching flowers.

Chris had been a godsend to media, speaking widely and freely with feeling, about how he’d crawled out through the smoke suffocating those on the third floor, and about the ones who hadn’t made it.

“This morning, waking up and coming back, it was very emotional to see the building and know that the bros are still in there.”

He walked across the road with his small bouquet of roses, then separated the flowers and attached them to a pillar box, just above a poster calling for rights for strippers and sex workers.

“Three lots of flowers, coz I lost three bros.”

The flowers were fake, unlike the tears Chris held back.

They wouldn’t fade. Like the memories for everyone there that night.

On an opposite corner, on a wooden seat, Ali Nasar faced the sun and the building that had been his home for seven years.

He’d arrived from Somalia in 1996, having endured the chaotic Black Hawk Down days of Mogadishu, seeking a more peaceful home.

The lodge was OK, he said, close to the city, Newtown’s shops, McDonald’s, the supermarket. He paid $300 a week, sharing a bathroom and kitchen on the second floor.

That’s where the 72-year-old was when he heard fire alarms and a neighbour shouting and banging on his door.

“Go out! Come on, come on, come on! Fire, fire, fire!”

Nasar escaped wearing shorts and a puffer jacket, spending the next few hours outside watching the building burn.

“Shit. The rain, cold, fire. Horrible night.”

Around 3am, taxis took survivors to Newtown Park, giving them food and clothes.

So here he was now, in brown dress shoes from the Salvation Army, red socks, navy blue drill trousers, the black jacket he fled in, and a blue woolly hat he’d paid $10 for at Countdown.

Everything else was gone.

“My passport, my citizenship, my laptop, telephone, bankcards, my documents from Somalia, my land certificates. I don’t have anything.

“Everybody’s run away empty.”

They’d found him a bed at Sojourn Apartment Hotel the previous night, but the comfort didn’t help him sleep, or his headaches.

Now he was waiting for a taxi to take him to the YHA backpacker hostel, where there was a room until Monday.

“After Monday, I don’t know.”

Half an hour later, Nasar sat in the Sojourn hotel’s lobby still waiting for the taxi that would take him to his new accommodation, the first stop in an uncertain future.

He cradled a cup of tea, a small water bottle on the table in front of him. He had no bag.

This was what 72 years of life had been reduced to.

He had no family to turn to.

“No, only me, alone.”

As time ticked over, questions reared up.

On Tuesday morning, just hours after the flames had died to a slow smoulder, talk of arson hung heavy in the still air.

The earlier 10.30pm wailing that resident Simon Hanify dismissed as a false alarm coincided with a couch fire on the upper floors. He couldn’t have gone up to check, though, because residents’ swipe cards only opened the door to their floor. The fire wasn’t a big enough deal that anyone thought to report it to the cops. But later, it got people wondering.

By Wednesday afternoon, police said they were treating the building blaze as suspicious. A few hours later, they launched a homicide investigation.

On Thursday night, a man was charged with arson.

How do you even know if a fire was deliberately lit? You track its footprint from the outside in. Look for burn patterns, the whoosh of how an open door or window might have fanned the flames. You scour the internet for photos and video, and read eyewitness evidence. And you ask yourself: “Why did it grow, and why did it spread?”

You look for an unnatural burn path that might suggest an accelerant. And when you find the heart of the maze, you look for that deadly spark - a heater, dodgy electrics, cooking gone wrong.

In places, you crawl on your hands and knees, moving inches at a time, says a fire investigator, who would not be named.

“It can be dirty, it can be black, it can be wet. There will be tripping hazards, fall hazards. There'll be material that needs to be made safe before you can move into an area. In today's society, everybody wants an immediate answer of what the cause is.This could take weeks or months to determine.

“It's not as simple as they show on TV. It will not be done in 60 minutes with commercial breaks.”

There were questions, too, about whether our fleet of ageing fire trucks – with more than a quarter past their “target life” – is up to the task of protecting precious lives.

“Undervalued”, “Underpaid”, “Understaffed”, “Fire Crisis” screamed the signs in Newtown Fire Station’s windows less than a year ago, during industrial action.

And there were questions about building rules that allow a hostel that can house more than 100 people to operate without sprinklers.

More than one resident claimed one of the lodge’s two stairwells was blocked. There’d been a break-in a month or so ago and the door was still broken, so they sealed it shut.

“There were no fire escapes, so only one way out. Which is why people had to jump out the f…ing window,” an angry Hanify said.

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has asked the Housing Minister to review the building rules. The fire investigator hopes it isn’t just more empty words.

“What will happen is, in two or three years' time, they'll have an inquest, the government may hold an inquiry, the government will set the rules. Because they don't want to make it more difficult to bloody build stuff, they'll minimise it, and in five years' time only the families will remember.”

By Thursday, as the first two bodies were being removed, curiosity in black and blistered Loafers Lodge was waning.

There were no more flowers, and a thinning media throng.

The first pigeons had returned to roost on the building’s ledges and edges.

Up the road, the Flight Centre advertised business class fares to Paris and Honolulu and San Francisco, and holidaymakers browsed brochures.

Nearby, a wall of bright conservation posters shouted, “We Can Do Better”.

It was something Mark Johnson believed, and had devoted himself to, since becoming South Wellington Parish’s vicar and St Thomas’s priest eight years ago.

The church had always welcomed those with addictions or mental health problems, making services “chaotic and beautiful” at times.

Johnson spent much of his time on the streets, getting to know those who lived there.

He was friends with well over a dozen Loafers Lodge residents.

“I know older people there, I know younger people there, I know people who are coming out of prison, I know people who are just living there because they can afford it.

“I know very amazing, kind, beautiful people there. I know other people who are probably a bit unsafe.

“It’s like the rest of Newtown, or the rest of the city – you have all kinds of people.”

For all its faults and reputation, the lodge was still a roof over people’s heads, an alternative to the street, Johnson said.

Now those people were being dispersed to other accommodation, he worried the former residents might lose the communities they had created around Newtown, the touchstones of familiarity and stability.

“A lot of the guys down there, their lives are pretty on edge all the time.

“For some of them, literally, their lives have been full of days like that, where they’re running to stay alive.”

And somehow, through the ghastliness of what they went through on Tuesday, and the shit they’d endured in the past, and the fog of the future, they had to try to comprehend they were lucky.

Lucky to be alive.