The plight of Canterbury homeowners

The Government’s package for Canterbury home­owners with badly damaged land has brought resolution for some and dismay for others. Rebecca Macfie looks at the circumstances of three households.

A silt-ruined street in Bexley/photo David White

Brian Frisken’s earthquake has been, he says, “a bit of a struggle”. Indeed, a less robust person than the 75-year-old former seaman might have buckled under the strain of the past few months.

Soon after the February 22 quake, his wife, Marjorie, a resident of the badly damaged Churchill Courts rest home in the suburb of Shirley, was evacuated from Christchurch. Frisken vividly remembers the day she and the other frail and elderly residents of the home were airlifted away. “It was a dreadful day. They were all sitting there in the lounge and there wasn’t a word. They knew something was going on, but there wasn’t a word. It was heartbreaking.”

Marjorie ended up in Dunedin at 11.30 that night, and she hasn’t been back to Christchurch since. Frisken, who used to visit her every day from their Bexley home of 30 years, made the long drive south to see her, but it was almost too much for him – and his car, which struggled over Kilmog Hill, north of Dunedin, in the rain.

Thankfully, the Canterbury District Health Board later came to the rescue with a scheme for family members of the hundreds of elderly residents of damaged rest homes who have been shifted elsewhere in the country. Every Thursday he is flown to Dunedin to visit Marjorie, an arrangement for which he is enormously grateful.

In the meantime, life at his small home on the banks of the Avon River has been inconvenient and difficult. When the Listener first met him after the February quake, he had just carted a huge volume of silt from his section, his street was almost impassable as a result of damage caused by liquefaction, and he was without power, running water or sewerage.

It was a month before electricity was restored and he went four months without sewerage, reliant on a chemical toilet that he emptied into holes in his garden. Three weeks ago Christ­church City Council installed a temporary sewage holding tank in his street, which enabled him to use his toilet for the first time since February 22. That first flush, he recalls, “was bliss”.

Earthquake Commission assessors told him his house, which was shunted several centimetres sideways in the February quake, would have to be rebuilt, although he has not received his payout from the agency. Shortly after the EQC visit, an assessor from his insurance company, State, told him the place could be jacked up, repiled and repaired for $66,000.

When the 5.6 quake struck on June 13, he was playing golf. He went straight home to check on his property and clean up. While he was vacuuming, the 6.3 quake struck and threw him out of the open lounge door onto his deck. As he sat recovering and texting his granddaughter, he heard the glug-glug-glug sound of silt oozing up around his house – again.

“I just watched it. It was heartbreaking.” He thought, “It can stay there”, but his daughter and her boyfriend came and cleaned up the worst of it. His street is once again a smashed-up quagmire.

By the time the Government announced the results of investigations into land damage in Christchurch’s eastern suburbs and colour-coded the city into red (areas to be abandoned), orange (still to be decided), green (no problems) and white (waiting for geotechnical analysis), Frisken was already resigned to the fact his land was not viable for rebuilding.

Because he is a homeowner in the residential red zone, the Government’s buyout package presents him with two options: either sell the land and house to the Government at the 2007 rating valuation ($222,000); or sell only his 353sq m section to the Government at the rating valuation of $82,000 and pursue his house claim with his insurance company. Although he is yet to receive a detailed assessment from State, he fears it will offer only the $66,000 that the company’s assessor told him it would cost to repair the house, rather than full replacement.

Both options are likely to leave him with a payout that falls short of what it will cost to either buy another small one- or two-bedroom home, or a section to build a replacement house on. And, he says, as a retiree, he wouldn’t get a mortgage to cover the balance.

“So obviously I would have to rent. You’re between a rock and a hard place, especially at my age. There will be others in the same boat.”

Many others, judging by the questions and concerns aired in the past few days at public meetings held throughout the red zone to explain the package. For those with modest houses on small sections in the east of the city, the value of their payout will scarcely meet the cost of a bare section elsewhere. Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority chief executive Roger Sutton has acknowledged the problem, and floated the possibility of using his sweeping powers to amend the city’s planning rules to ensure the release of small affordable sections onto the market.

Meantime, Frisken is trying to get the answers he needs from State Insurance so he can make an informed decision. He intends to take his time over it, and remain – as he has been all these months – stoic: “We’ve got to be strong about it and keep up with the game. It’s a bit of a struggle but we’ll get there.”

At Kairaki Beach, near Kaiapoi, no one slept the night after the Government announcement that the tiny settlement of 60-odd houses must be abandoned.

Unlike in Christchurch, the September 4 earthquake was a much more damaging event here than the February 22 shake. The old sewer main through the settlement was shattered, liquefaction caused damage to land and many houses were severely battered. But by last week the community felt it was on the road to recovery. Wai­makariri District Council (WDC) had just finished putting in a new $1.5 million sewer line, which also services the nearby Pines Beach settlement.

The council had also rolled out plans to begin rebuilding in the Kaiapoi area, starting with Kairaki Beach.

“The council has been doing a fantastic job of getting ready to go,” says local resident Tim Stephenson. “They were just about to get started.”

Then Prime Minster John Key and Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee declared the area to be  a red zone, saying its citizens would have to choose between the two standard options.

None of the locals saw it coming – not even the WDC, whose officials were advised only half an hour before the Government announcement. “Everyone was stunned,” says Stephenson.

He and his wife, Ann Worthy-Stephenson, believe the decision is completely flawed and they have no intention of taking either buyout option. They love their tight-knit village, which is clustered along Kairaki Beach’s single street, Featherston Ave, and where many properties have been in the same families for generations.

Their beautiful new home overlooking Saltwater Creek was designed by Stephenson. It is built on 5.5m piles, with walls made from artfully formed pre-cast concrete panels. After nine months of earthquakes it is as solid as a rock – proof, he says, that the land is suitable for building, provided the right method is used. He has had an independent geotechnical engineer review the land data that Tonkin & Taylor collated for the EQC and the Government. The conclusion was that the soil at Kairaki Beach is some of the best suited for piled construction of any of the earthquake-affected zones.

“The answer is not to abandon the houses, but to rebuild with engineered solutions,” says Stephenson. “It’s not hard to make a structure strong enough so it won’t be ripped apart in lateral spread.”

The couple haven’t even bothered looking up their rating valuation to find out what they would get under the Government’s buyout proposal because they are determined not to leave. “It ain’t going to happen,” says Worthy-Stephenson. “We ain’t going.”

For Steve and Marie Davies, the new earthquake colour-coding means yet more waiting. They have already waited for nine months since their Reay Pl, Kaiapoi, home was torn in half by the September earthquake and their little cul-de-sac and the adjacent Courtenay Dr subdivision was savaged by the effects of liquefaction.

Although there was more liquefaction in February, it wasn’t as severe as in September. As the year has worn on, the Davies have received encouraging signs of progress on their property. About a month ago their house was demolished, and they were expecting EQC to start repairing their damaged land in October. Waimakariri District Council had rolled out plans to install underground dams along the nearby Kaiapoi River bank to prevent lateral spreading of the ground in future quakes.

Their insurer, AMI, had agreed to rebuild their house, and concept plans had been drawn up. “We were hoping maybe we would be starting to build in December,” says Steve Davies.

After months of renting in another part of town, they and their children had even been able to move back into their own street because an elderly neighbour decided to shift in with her daughter, enabling them to rent her damaged but repairable home.

Then, on June 14, the district council advised residents the Government had told it to halt its residential rebuilding programme because of new seismic information. A little more than a week later, the Davies and their neighbours got the news that their streets were zoned orange – which means further detailed assessment is required to determine if land repair is practical. Brownlee has promised the results of those investigations will be released over the coming “weeks and months”.

It was depressing news. “With Kaiapoi, we were all set to go,” says Steve Davies. The family now face more uncertainty than ever. They are approaching the end of their 12 months of rental accommodation cover provided by their insurer.

When that runs out, they will have to seek the Government’s rental subsidy for homeowners displaced by the earthquake.

And they are well aware their orange-zoned land could end up being tagged red, forcing them to abandon their plans.

Frustrating though this further delay is, Steve Davies says it’s important decisions are made on the best possible information. “We don’t want to be building on land that won’t be insurable, so they have to get it right. It’s got to be safe.”

And in the event their land is red-zoned, at least they know they will ultimately get a new house under their AMI insurance policy. Unlike red-zoned residents with repairable damage to their homes, to whom insurance companies say they will pay only the value of that repair work, even though the land is to be abandoned, the Davies are “lucky – our house is written off”. And the rating value on their land is enough to enable them to buy a section elsewhere, says Steve Davies.

“The way I look at it you have to be grateful we live in New Zealand, and the people of New Zealand are doing this,” he says. “If we were in Haiti or China it would be ‘your house is gone, move on’. It’s humbling to know that the country will look after its people. That’s what we’ve got to think about, rather than getting grumpy.”