Skip bins line the streets as Aucklanders brace for more rain
Tuesday, 31 January 2023
Mounds of sofas, beds and other household items piled on grass verges mark which houses have been gutted by the Auckland floods.
On Māngere’s Pito Place, Kelly Faaui, her husband, daughter, two brothers and niece have lost nearly everything.
Her husband and brothers were filling a skip with the furniture from their three-bedroom home on Tuesday.
Inside were two fridges and bags of clothes, the only items they’d managed to salvage.
**READ MORE:
* After floods and slips comes the clean up - so where do you start?
* State of emergency declared in Northland 'as a precautionary step'
* The red severe weather warning explained
**
The family does not have insurance.
The water was waist-high on Friday night.
“When it happened, my brother had to put my niece on his shoulders. It wasn’t safe for them to stay here,” Faaui said.
A sick neighbour had to be evacuated on an airbed mattress and floated down the street.
Asked what they would do now, Faaui said: “I don’t know, maybe start from scratch?”
Her 4-year-old daughter Malamaleao was playing with her play-dough on Tuesday.
“She doesn’t get it,” Faaui said.
“She just thinks we’re getting a new house.”
The family had been there for 10 years and were now staying with family.
“Everything’s gone, we literally lost everything.”
Officials from Kāinga Ora were visiting while Stuff was there, assessing homes.
It was too soon to know when the family would be able to find a new home.
Around the corner on Ventura St, some residents were laying out sandbags, in anticipation of what could hit them on Friday night.
One house appeared as if the entire concrete base had shifted. It remained fenced off.
A neighbour, who did not want to be named, said the stormwater catchment ponds across the road flooded and the water rose as high as the door handles on his ute, parked out front.
“We’ve lost some neighbours,” he said pointing to the badly damaged house.
“They won’t be able to move back in … It floated … they had their kids in there.”
Out on the street, the water level went from ankle height to his bellybutton in about 30 minutes.
He said he had as much as 250mm of water through his newly built house.
He had sandbags in his front room: “Just in case it overflows again … something is better than nothing.”
A woman nearby said she would like the military to turn up and help with sandbagging and saving what was left of their possessions.
A short time later, a ute carrying four soldiers pulled up around the corner. One of the soldiers got out of the ute and took a photo of a house nearby, before leaving.
Two police officers also pulled up. One of the constables explained to a resident they would be making patrols in the area, ensuring no one was breaking into abandoned homes.
About 600m away on Tarata Cre, builders had already begun working at Victor Babu’s home, ripping off the flood-damaged gib board and replacing it.
Babu and his family had only finished cleaning up at 3am.
“We don’t want to do that again.”
But he said if another forecast storm hit on Tuesday night and caused further flooding, there wasn’t a lot else he could do.
His neighbour Anna Betram said the water came through the floor boards of her home and out of the toilet.
She was taking everything to the dump.
“We can’t really clean it, all the furniture, the carpet, everything.”
She placed possessions on her bed and other surfaces, but everything got wet, she said.