November 14 earthquake epicentre: Waiau's slow road to recovery

Friday, 10 November 2017

It is the only answer Peter Wallace gives without having to think a little first. It arrives on a hair trigger, almost before the question is finished. What is the mood in Waiau one year on from the earthquake?

'Sad.'

On November 14, 2016, Wallace's home in the north Canterbury town was shaken to bits by a magnitude-7.8 earthquake centred less than 5 kilometres away. The damage was so great it took more than two hours to get all nine occupants – Wallace, his wife Jules, three grandchildren, three foster children and a family friend – safely outside.

Asked to recount his experience of what happened inside shortly after the shaking started at 12.02am, Wallace provides a detailed seven-minute response that includes the sentence, 'There was a dent in the ceiling from the toilet bowl'. The house, needless to say, is a write-off.

**READ MORE:

* A caravan for the winter, social life disrupted and hard times in Waiau

* Closest to the epicentre, Waiau slowly recovers

* Normality creeps back into Waiau

* North Canterbury's historic Waiau pub gutted** 

By December, Wallace and his family were in a new home in nearby Rotherham. A dizzyingly fast move in a community somewhat short on excess housing after its most powerful earthquake in 150 years. Some friends helped with the financing. Nearly a year later the house – now home to eight people – hums with life, even though Wallace is the only one home right now.

Myriad shoes, big and small, litter the doorway; schoolbooks, drawing and projects protrude from piles in the kitchen; at least two dogs, one cat, and several birds make themselves comfortable outside. This is a home that looks happily lived in. Why so quick off the mark with the 'sad' Waiau diagnosis?

'You go in there and you can feel the depression,' Wallace says, 'It's not as bad as it was but it's still there.'

'It's a sad place. It's taken a long time for the recovery. Just getting insurance sorted, getting the infrastructure back up, it's just taking time and that's holding people back.'

Herein lies the enigma of an earthquake recovery, a journey New Zealand is sadly familiar with. The process is working well, unless it isn't. And if it isn't going well, is that someone's fault, or just a fact of life? There is no easy answer. Wallace is happy with his personal circumstances, not so much for the wider community. Across the Hurunui district, the needle seems to hover in the middle.

Mayor Winton Dalley says morale is better than expected. The council has just completed a productive round of meetings for the public to hear from insurance companies, banks and the Earthquake Commission, or meet one-on-one with builders, engineers and architects who are thin on the ground in the Hurunui.

Across the district 74 properties are red-stickered – too dangerous to inhabit – while 262 have a yellow sticker, denoting severe damage. The damaged buildings are spread across about half of the the Hurunui district's 9000 square kilometres, Dalley says.

'It's a massive geographic area and a very sparsely spread population . . . The percentage of people [affected] here is probably larger than it was in the Canterbury quake. While the numbers may be small the effect on the community is pretty massive.'

The Government recognised this, Dalley said. Ministers descended on Hurunui in the days and weeks after the earthquake and seemed to genuinely understand what the problems were. A thinly-populated rural community that had little spare housing stock and limited access to building professionals, for one.

In January, Housing Minister Nick Smith organised for some temporary accommodation used after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake to be relocated to farms in the Waiau district. Everyone waited.

The first houses were delivered in May, the same month Smith announced a temporary accommodation village for Waiau using the same Christchurch stock. Those houses were ready by July.

'We had a huge window of opportunity to get them here and it was just a saga of small hold ups that prevented that happening,' Dalley says.

'If it had been a very cold winter people would have suffered.'

Ministries dragged the chain, Dalley says. Local businesses felt they had to fight to get access to the Government's wage subsidy package, 'where it seemed to be something that Kaikōura had as of right'.

Insurance claims are well-advanced. The Insurance Council reported that 91 per cent of residential claims had been assessed by the end of October. Sixty-five per cent of building claims and 92 per cent of home contents claims were fully settled. Much of the remainder is expected to be settled by the end of the year.

Building consent applications at the Hurunui District Council since July are up more than 50 per cent on the same period last year and the volume of new houses has more than doubled in the same time. About 10 per cent of issued consents were noted as earthquake-related.

However, council building team leader Kerry Walsh said there is much more to come. The bulk of the applications are 'fix-ups and alterations and repairs', he says.

'There's no real additional new dwellings and we know there's [74] out there that have [red sticker] notices on them, so there's a bit of work to come in.'

Paul Newberry-Johnson isn't waiting on his insurance, but his recovery is far from over. Cinder blocks lie strewn on the driveway; in the bedroom two flimsy supports hold up a piece of jib board – all that's left of the wall with the bricks on the ground.

The first engineer to inspect the house declared it a write-off, Newberry-Johnson says. He didn't even want to go inside. A sum insured payout was forthcoming. Newberry-Johnson believed it covered the cost of demolition, about $30,000. It didn't.

'I had a phone conference with this woman in Kaikoura,' he says, 'The very last thing she said to me on the phone was, 'By the way Paul, we're not going to knock down your house'.'

Annette Purvis, general manager of IAG's disaster recovery unit, says Newberry-Johnson's policy included cover demolition costs, but because the damage to the house was estimated at more than the sum he was insured for, demolition could not be covered in the settlement. 'We spoke with him a week before settlement about this.'

Now, Newberry-Johnson is doing the job himself – 'I've got some mates with a few toys'. He and partner Frances O'Connell​ lived in a caravan on their property after the earthquake. They moved into a friend's cottage just out of town over winter to escape the cold, but are returning to the caravan for the demolition.

'It was so nice having a shower, toilet, kitchen,' O'Connell says.

The contents claim was a battle too, Newberry-Johnson says. IAG believed many items were recoverable, but Newberry-Johnson argued they were contaminated with asbestos. Experts eventually confirmed his concerns, he says, but he still puts his losses at about $8000. Purvis confirmed a specialist asbestos company found the toxic material in the house. Only some items could be decontaminated. 'Any items unable to be salvaged were covered in the contents claim settlement.'

Newberry-Johnson has not emerged from the process a satisfied customer.

'I just got sick of it,' he says.

'We've had to put our life on hold … battling the bloody insurance companies for what we thought we were originally entitled to.

​'It's like you're in slow motion. I actually had to go back to work because I felt myself getting a bit anxious … I just had to remove myself from it as best I could because I knew it was going to go on for such a long time.'

On the main street, Brenda Smith, of Brenda's on Lyndon cafe and dairy, says business is good. Unpredictable, with swarms of road workers coming and going and changeable conditions on State Highway 1 doing to same to through-traffic, but good. She settled the last of the insurance claims for her business a couple of months ago. The experience was a little unsettling, she says.

Since the 2011 earthquakes, insurers have moved to sum insured coverage for properties, where customers are insured for a finite dollar amount. There are no full replacements policies, covering whatever costs are necessary to rebuild what you had, no building company project managing construction.

'It's hard,' Smith says, 'We get offered money and you accept that money and then you have to do everything yourself. Christchurch didn't do that. Which makes it hard because you need to trust what you're getting and trust what you're doing.'

Underinsurance is a small but significant problem. Only about 10 per cent of building claims for earthquake damage are for more than $100,000, and then only some of those will be total losses. But those properties are now sum-insured rather than covered for full replacement. And looking at how much houses cost in your neighbourhood, then insuring your home for about the same amount, isn't going to cut it.

'Compared to New Zealand-wide standards you've got housing in some of the rural areas that is very low cost in terms of market value but in terms of rebuild cost quite possibly significantly more,' Insurance Council chief executive Tim Grafton says.

'Some people are caught in that respect . . . [it's] a big problem for people who did underinsure themselves. The message to New Zealanders is to try and ensure that you've got the best sum insured that you can in place, which should be based on the rebuild of your house.'

Nowhere was underinsurance felt more keenly in Waiau than the pub. The building was insured, but the policy had no natural disaster coverage. The stricken, century-old building still sits, red-stickered, behind protective fencing.

There are 12 separate types of damage keeping the red sticker in place, publican Michelle Beri says. She and fellow publican Lindsay Collins are confident they have remedied six of them, but the remaining half is the difficult half: repairing lintels, replacing windows. One chimney still needs to be secured, which means scaffolding, which means money they don't have.

'There's so much work to do,' Beri says.

'If we can lift this notice, we may be able to move back in there, we may be able to trade with accommodation.'

Maybe. In the meantime, their new pop-up bar is doing a healthy trade. More of the turnover comes from food than drinks, an unheard of ratio in the old pub and even more impressive when you consider the entire bar is about the size of the old kitchen. Beri and Collins live in a portacom and a shed respectively.

'We're going to do it,' Beri says, 'We have to do it. We have to do it for the community.'

The community is holding together. Everyone in Waiau, and across Waiau, seems to laud its spirit. There is an underdog quality to it.

A town with a population of under 300 that lost its pub, historic cottage, bowling green, church, swimming pool and nearly half of its school roll (the numbers are recovering now) forging ahead in spite of it all. It collectively bristles at every reference to the 'Kaikoura' earthquake. The epicentre was just 5km from Waiau. As the official T-shirts in the pub say: 'It's Waiau's Fault.'