Man who raised Loafers Lodge fire alarm describes horror, and hardship

Saturday, 10 June 2023

Raymond Lauder was the first person to discover the Loafers Lodge fire and raised the alarm. He escaped with the clothes he was wearing, horrific memories, and one terrible regret. And as Mike White discovers, Lauder’s struggle to get back on his feet continues, nearly a month after the blaze that killed five people.

Quite often, in the short time Raymond Lauder lived at Loafers Lodge, he would be watching TV in the lounge, when Liam Hockings would come down to cook his dinner.

They were neighbours on the dosshouse’s top floor, Hockings in room 53, Lauder in 52. Hockings had been there for years, Lauder since the end of March, when he got sick of living in his car, and agencies said Loafers was the only available accommodation.

Hockings would come down the stairs from his room with food he’d bought from the Countdown across the road, and always ask Lauder the same question: “Have you eaten?”

That offer to share his dinner was one of the many things that had quickly endeared Hockings, a 50-year-old journalist, to Lauder.

“He was one of the gentlest, softest, kindest men I’ve ever met,” says Lauder. “He was like a little brother.”

On the evening of Monday May 15, Lauder had been the last person in the TV lounge. He’d spent time in prison when he was younger, so being in his room was too much like all those years in a cell.

But eventually he’d gone upstairs to the simple, single room he paid $270 a week for, coming back down again around 10.30pm to get some water.

As he did so, he bumped into another resident who told Lauder he’d just helped put out a fire in a sofa in the TV lounge.

Lauder went to have a look, and was shocked at the damage, the two-seater couch having been mostly destroyed.

“Couches don’t spontaneously combust. A cigarette wouldn’t have done that, it would have gone out,” says Lauder.

“That was deliberate, mate.”

Lauder had heard the fire alarm go off, but ignored it like usual.

“Every night in the kitchen pricks would come home pissed, put something on, f..k off to their room to get something, and forget about their food. Every night the smoke alarm would go off, and you’d have to turn all the fans on, and open the windows, and air the place out.”

But seeing the couch, Lauder knew something different was going on this time. Something bad.

He’d been convicted of arson many years before, and had a sixth sense that the person who’d lit the sofa fire, would probably try it again.

So Lauder decided he wouldn’t go to sleep that night – he’d stay awake. And first thing in the morning, he’d get out of this shithole.

Not long after midnight, Lauder, 57, came downstairs to the third-floor kitchen adjoining the lounge, for a cup of coffee to help him stay awake. Another resident, JJ, was there cooking some pork in the microwave.

Within seconds, they smelt smoke, and JJ began hunting around the stoves to see what was burning.

But then they noticed grey smoke through the double doors that led to a hallway and rooms on the northern side of the floor.

Lauder told JJ he’d investigate.

He went through the doors, turned left, and within metres could see smoke pouring out from around the doors to two rooms, almost as if there was a fan inside pushing it out.

“Just thick, black, hard-out smoke, that toxic, f…..g mattress smoke.”

Lauder banged on the doors, tried the handles, and then tried to kick them in.

“I’ve got a fused ankle, I can’t bend it. It’s f…..g mean for kicking in doors, man, I’m telling you. I’ve never, ever kicked a door I haven’t been able to kick in. But I couldn’t kick these in.”

By then, the smoke that had been above his head when he first noticed the fire, had filled the hallway so only a foot of clear air remained above the floor.

Running towards the back of the building, shouting, he met the floor supervisor, a tenant who residents would go to if there were problems after hours.

Lauder yelled at him there was a huge fire, and that the supervisor needed to set off the fire alarm.

He then turned towards the lift, but had second thoughts about being caught in it during a fire.

So he stepped out onto a nearby veranda, but there was no way down from there, as smoke advanced further down the hallway towards him.

“And I thought about what to do. I thought, do I alert more people – and I couldn’t – I had to gap it.

“I know I’d made enough noise to wake the f…..g dead, I just had to get the f..k out of there.

“It was terrifying man. It was so hard to be brave.”

Lauder’s electronic key didn’t give him access to the first and second floors, so he continued down the stairwell and out into an alleyway beside the vehicle testing station, and on to Adelaide Rd.

He stood in shorts and a tee-shirt, awash with adrenaline, bare feet cut by broken glass at some stage during his escape.

Everything else, other than his swipe card, was back in his room on the fourth floor.

Back in the small room with a bed, a table, and a chair, next to Liam Hockings’.

A room now right above the fire, on a wooden mezzanine floor, where the smoke had already begun to find its way.

As he fled the building, Lauder was thinking of his daughter.

The pre-schooler was the reason he’d shifted from Blenheim to Wellington six months before, wanting to be closer to her, even though he knew virtually nobody in the capital.

“I couldn’t risk my life,” says Lauder. “I had to be selfish with my life because I didn’t want to wreck my daughter’s life.”

But by the time he got to the street, shivering, and staring back at the lodge he knew was gradually being engulfed, his thoughts turned to Hockings.

He began scanning the growing crowd, panicked faces flickeringly lit by blue and orange and red lights of the emergency services, to see if he could spot his neighbour. But he couldn’t see him.

Instead, he’s sure he heard screams from those trapped inside the lodge.

“And I still f…..g hear them.”

Lauder can’t get his head around why it seemed an age before firefighters trained water on the blaze, even after he told them where it was, and the best routes to get to it.

(Fire and Emergency New Zealand says it has comprehensive investigations underway into all aspects of the fire, and isn’t able to comment before these are completed.)

So every day now, Lauder lives with regret he didn’t do more, or warn his mate Liam.

“If I could replay events, after telling [the supervisor] about the alarm, I would have powered up the stairs and got everyone off the top floor.”

A couple of hours later, word filtered through the crowd that Hockings hadn’t made it out.

“And when I heard that, I began looking for the guy who did this, and plotting how to turn him into a f…..g paraplegic.”

But when Lauder thinks about the fire now, he believes it’s not just the person who lit the fire who has to be held accountable.

He points a finger at those who designed what he describes as a deathtrap with no sprinklers. The council who didn’t do adequate safety checks. The management who never told him about a fire plan or escape routes.

The managers who had to be badgered to replace smoke alarms and sensors in his room after it twice needed to be treated for bedbugs.

And Work and Income, who put people in such emergency accommodation, then wiped their hands and considered this was a permanent and suitable solution.

The way Lauder sees it, a place like Loafers Lodge should only have been a stop-gap measure while more adequate, long-term housing was found. Instead, some of the residents had been at the lodge with its frayed furniture, and shared bathrooms and kitchens, for years.

He wants all these people held responsible for what happened, so landlords and officials could see there was a price to pay if they didn’t look after tenants.

“That was a dangerous building, and it wasn’t an accident it was dangerous. It was on purpose – coz they didn’t give a f..k.

“We were just scum.”

Lauder says when people claim it wasn’t their fault, he wants to ask, would they have been happy if it was one of their family living on the top floor of Loafers?

“I don't want to let this go. I want to keep telling the whole world until something is done about it.

“I don’t want my dead mates to have f…..g died for nothing.”

Lauder knows for sure what would have happened if he hadn’t seen the burnt sofa earlier in the evening, realised it was deliberate, knew whoever was responsible could come back, and decided to stay awake.

“I would have been asleep in my room.

“Absolutely, I would have died like everyone else.”

Getting back on his feet hasn’t been straightforward – not that anyone predicted it would be.

Lauder is now in a house with another Loafers refugee, and two others, but wants to find somewhere permanent so he can share care of his daughter.

He’s frustrated at having to sometimes battle just to replace what he lost, and says the initial $500 survivors received from the public appeal overseen by the Wellington City Mission didn’t go far.

The community has been wonderfully generous, however, Lauder says. When he bought a pair of boots for winter from the Army surplus store, he was given 20% off once staff learnt he was a Loafers Lodge survivor. Second-hand shops have given him things for free.

But cash is king, and Lauder suggests all survivors should be given a lump sum from the $359,000 currently raised to help them.

“I’d rather they say, ‘Here’s two grand, that’s your cut out of what’s been donated, fix your life, drown your sorrows, do whatever you’ve got to do.

“If we buy crack or piss or whatever, that’s our problem, that’s our prerogative for going through that shit.

“We know what we need to fix our lives, not some social worker who knows nothing about us. Allow us to have the dignity to do what we want with our money.

“It’s marginalising us, making us feel like little children who can’t be trusted with money.”

City Missioner Murray Edridge has sympathy for Lauder’s view.

On Tuesday, a delegation of former residents, including Lauder, met with him to express concerns about how the appeal money was being distributed.

Following this, the City Mission decided to give all 92 survivors a further $1000, meaning about half of the money raised has now been spent.

“People have a view about whether you should give people cash,” says Edridge. “But at some point we’ve got to say, these people are adults who can make their own decisions.”

Edridge is adamant every cent the public has donated will be spent on the survivors, or the families of those who died, and he wants the money distributed quickly.

“It’s about saying, hey, we need to find a way to get this money out the door to you. But we’ve also got a responsibility to the public that we just don’t throw it out and see what happens.”

So far, the City Mission has paid to replace clothes and technology; topped up funeral expenses not paid by ACC; helped travel costs for victims’ families; and covered medical bills.

Edridge says counselling for those traumatised by what they went through, and setting up people in permanent housing, were two crucial areas money would also be spent on.

“My intention is to overspend the fund. I want to go out there in a few weeks and say, hey, you gave us $360,000, we spent $400,000.”

The City Mission, and the public, would foot any shortfall, Edridge says.

“We can argue whether the government should pay for it or not, but the reality is, I don’t have time to argue that at the moment. So we’re just getting on and paying it.”

What happened that night a month ago, still messes with Lauder, but it’s when he remembers Liam Hockings that he truly tears up.

“He was a very intelligent, very humble man. He f…..g didn’t deserve to die. Not like that.”

Lauder reckons he probably discovered the fire minutes after it was lit, thanks to his unease at what he’d seen earlier.

That intuition, and raising the alarm early, probably saved many lives.

“I don’t need to be a f…..g hero. My three-year-old daughter thinks I’m Superman, that’s enough for me.”

The reason he’s spoken up is because he knows many of the others at Loafers can’t, or don’t have the energy to fight to make sure this never happens again. Or they aren’t here any more to speak.

Murray Edridge says getting people like Lauder back on their feet would take a long time.

But there were bigger issues that also needed to be fixed.

“The 15 of May changed Wellington forever. Or at least I hope it did.

“We’ve got to come out of this so we don’t ever get to this place again.

“I think we’re all culpable, because we knew what it was like. I don’t want to be critical of the people who owned or ran the building, but it was accommodation that if you had any choices, you wouldn’t live there.

“And we’ve got to get to a better place in our community, where we’re prepared to invest enough so people don’t have to live in these sort of circumstances.”

A public service remembering those who died and were affected in the Loafers Lodge fire will be held at Wellington Cathedral of St Paul, 2 Hill St, at 5.30pm Thursday June 15, marking a month since the blaze.