Auckland floods: Bank takes insurance payout for home, leaving owners high and dry - Phil Twyford

Tracey Pilgrim’s mum was already beginning to float in floodwater by the time her daughter reached her.

Lifting the 91-year-old’s wheelchair up, the Pilgrim family carried her out from the granny flat on their West Auckland property and through the August 2021 floodwaters to the family’s main home.

There they perched the elderly woman’s wheelchair on top of the couch.

It was the only way to try to keep her safe from rising water filling the house, Pilgrim said.

The Pilgrims’ home would suffer hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage in that 2021 storm, yet it isn’t the only - or even worst - damage they’ve suffered.

Since buying their Urlich Dr property in Ranui in 2019, it’s been flooded five times in four years, with this year’s January floods the most devastating.

It’s left the Pilgrims in limbo - being unable to live in their home or secure a loan to repair it, while also being unable to sell or re-insure.

“It’s heart-wrenching,” Pilgrim said of the speed with which their lives turned upside-down.

“Within the space of a few hours, you go from being that person who goes to work every day and pays their mortgage to having nothing.”

With the devastated Pilgrims unsure of how or if they can move forward and being forced to live at their workplace, local Te Atatū Member of Parliament Phil Twyford has taken aim at the role their bank has played in the saga, calling it “scandalous”.

That’s because when the Pilgrims’ insurance company paid out damages to them after the August 2021 flooding, the family’s bank claimed the entire payment and used it to instead pay down the property’s mortgage.

While this did take some of the mortgage repayment burden off the Pilgrims, it also left them no money to pick up the pieces and begin rebuilding.

The family had earlier bought the property in 2019 as a dream home. It included a flat for Tracey Pilgrim’s mum and room for their children.

So - determined to get back on their feet - the Pilgrims then spent the next year and a half scrabbling together whatever extra time and cash they could find.

Doing repairs and renovations on weekends and at night after their day jobs, they clocked long hours of hard work.

While still needing to fix much of their home’s floors among other outstanding work, they eventually managed to move back in after successfully renovating the bedrooms and buying appliances and starting to feel the waters about finding a company to re-insure them again.

Then January’s floods hit and destroyed their home and possessions.

What life threw at the Pilgrims was “just brutal”, especially after the banks claimed the insurance and forced them to work their “guts out”, Te Atatū MP Twyford said.

“What happened to Tracey and [her husband] Mike is scandalous,” he said.

“For the banks to have taken their insurance payout, showed a lack of humanity.”

Twyford said he understood it is regarded as standard practice that banks can take an insurance payout for themselves in order to reduce the amount of money they are at risk of losing.

But banks also have discretion to be flexible and set tailored solutions for individual customers, he said.

“Given the multiple billions of dollars that the big Australian banks are making every year in New Zealand, I think that giving a hand to flooded homeowners who are really up against it financially would be a good place to start,” Twyford said.

A NZ Banking Association spokesman said he couldn’t comment on the Pilgrims’ individual case, but said banks had played a part in helping those in need.

“Our banks are part of the communities they serve and responded quickly as the flooding and cyclone events unfolded, making $1.4 billion available in low-cost lending, and donating $6.5 million to disaster relief funds. They also provided loan repayment relief and access to term deposits,” he said.

“Anyone facing financial challenges should speak to their bank as soon as possible. Depending on the circumstances involved banks can look at solutions on a case-by-case basis.”

Alex Kwak lives across the Waimoko stream from the Pilgrims on Birdwood Rd in Swanson in West Auckland and has also battled floods. Photo / Jason Oxenham

Twyford said the Pilgrims’ experience highlighted the need for the Government, councils, banks and insurers to get together and work on a programme to tackle the risk in districts at risk of flooding.

The Pilgrims are among 263 West Auckland homeowners badly affected by the January floods, according to a report commissioned by Twyford.

Across the wider city, about 1700 properties were red- or yellow-stickered as a result of flooding or landslide damage, with Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown today proposing a $1.4b recovery programme.

Twyford has earlier been vocal in calling for the Government to step in and buy out some of the most at-risk homeowners, saying it would be irresponsible and impractical for them to rebuild where they are knowing it is likely they’ll be flooded again.

However, in many other cases, there are other steps that can be taken, including ensuring suitable infrastructure is in place and that streams and stormwater systems are flowing freely, he said.

One bridge in West Auckland was “not fit for purpose” and did not have sufficient space under it for the water to flow, causing three neighbourhoods to flood, Twyford said.

He also said that while Auckland needed more houses, new developments could not just spring up as a sea of concrete that causes ever more water to run off than what would otherwise have soaked into the soil naturally.

That meant developments needed systems like permeable concrete and mandatory tanks to hold water and release it slowly into the stormwater system, while natural flow-ways should be kept as parks and green spaces.

For the Pilgrims, meanwhile, such collective lessons will come too late.

When they bought their home in 2019, the former owner told them the nearby Waimoko Stream presented little risk, while the LIM report only made mention of a one-in-100-year flood event.

And instead of settling down for good in a home with the whole family, the Pilgrims are now forced apart.

Their adult children have had to move out, while Tracey’s mum has had to move into a rest home and the Pilgrims themselves live at their workplace.

“Each time I lose a bit more of my sanity,” Pilgrim said of their situation and continued storms hitting West Auckland.