Jane Phare questions why, when history repeats itself, Aucklanders are allowed to rebuild on potentially lethal sites.
Robyn MacKay could hear the cliff moving behind her as she ran down to her house to call 111. It was a rainy Saturday night and minutes earlier her neighbour Chris Grove had called from his home perched above hers on Shore Rd in Remuera.
The earth was moving in a strange way under his house, Grove said. He was worried.
“Come up and have a look.”
MacKay ran up a set of stairs leading to her neighbour’s house and was shocked by what she saw in the darkness.
“As soon as I got there I thought, ‘Oh, my God.’ I could see the whole earth moving behind the house and I just ran. I said: ‘Chris, you’ve got to get out of here.’”
MacKay dashed back down to her home to call emergency services.
“It [the earth] was literally coming down the cliff after me. As I was running down the stairs I could hear it.”
Moments later Grove’s house, with him still in it, came crashing down on top of Mackay’s property, trapping her neighbour inside his now-destroyed kitchen.
Mackay escaped uninjured but the Fire Service spent two hours cutting the injured Grove out of the debris using a chainsaw.
“They risked life and limb to save him because while they were cutting him out of the house, the earth and the whole house were still moving, coming down,” she said. “It was a very dangerous situation.”
The story of this chilling escape could easily be one from Auckland’s recent floods and Cyclone Gabrielle. Instead, it’s more than 25 years old, taken from a clipping from the Herald’s print files dated September 29, 1997.
The reason it sounds familiar is that the same Shore Rd cliff collapsed again this year, this time claiming a life of a man who lived just two doors along from Mackay’s property. Remuera resident David Lennard was killed when tonnes of cliff soil and debris cascaded down on to his Shore Rd home on a Friday night in late January after a torrential downpour.
Days after Lennard’s body was recovered, his home was demolished, all signs of it taken away. Now, a question hangs over that vacant section. What now? The same question hangs over a dozen houses stretching along that part of Shore Rd, most of them red stickered, a couple with yellow stickers.
Perched high above Shore Rd is another red-stickered victim, a $10 million Arney Rd home, its rear foundations now teetering over the edge. It was a landslide from the cliff below this property that buried Lennard.
After the 1997 slip, Mackay rebuilt a solid, stylish home on the same site. Now her house has been red-stickered - for the second time. So has another house built behind, below where Grove’s house was. Walk along Shore Rd past the safety tape and fencing, and it’s obvious the properties were abandoned in a get-out-now hurry as multiple parts of the cliff behind started to slide down.
History repeated itself, too, out on Auckland’s west coast in late January when Muriwai cliffs collapsed after torrential rain, leaving in their wake destroyed houses, stories of near escapes and two deaths. Two Muriwai roads, Domain Crescent and Motutara Rd, have featured in news reports this year.
Fifty-eight years ago Domain Crescent and the tiny settlement of Muriwai hit the headlines after massive slips wrecked houses and caused the deaths of two residents.
Following two days of heavy rain in August 1965, hundreds of Aucklanders day-tripped out to Muriwai to gaze in wonder at an enormous slip that had roared down the hillside below Domain Crescent causing death and destruction below. Witnesses spoke of a “fantastic wave of mud” travelling at an estimated 60mph (96km/h) an hour. The slip travelled 200m, destroying homes and burying Isobel Crane and her 18-year-old daughter Margaret in its terrifying wake.
It was part of Domain Crescent that collapsed in January, sending two properties hurtling down the cliff and trapping volunteer firefighters Dave van Zwanenberg and Craig Stevens at a Motutara Rd property below. Busy rescuing a trapped resident and digging a ditch to try to divert the water away, the men didn’t see the slip coming.
Zwanenberg died at the scene but it would be two days before the slip was stable enough for rescuers to retrieve his body. Stevens was rescued that night in a critical condition but died three days later.
Days after the slip, Domain Crescent residents were told they could return home for 20 minutes to collect possessions. But when geotechnical engineers inspecting land on the street realised it was still moving underfoot, residents were told to evacuate immediately. “Leave on foot, do not drive,” they were told in an alert text. Part of Motutara Rd below is also off-limits.
So why are lessons not learned? Why do Aucklanders keep building on the edge of unstable cliffs, or at the bottom of cliffs that could one day bury them in their houses? And why does Auckland Council let them? The reasons, it seems, are complex. They include Aucklanders’ obsession with property and sea views, greed, legislation that allows them to build pretty much anywhere, a desperate need for homes, infill housing, pressure from developers, and lack of accountability.
Geologist Martin Brook points a finger at the 1981 Local Government Amendment Act, specifically section 641A. That section effectively allows councils to permit building or rebuilding on unstable land but absolves councils from any civil responsibility. That get-out-of-jail-free card was introduced after the 1979 Abbotsford landslide in Dunedin. Miraculously, no one died when 18ha slid 48m down a hill in just 15 minutes, although some residents were injured. The tonnes of rubble, sand and earth took with it 68 houses, sparking a Commission of Inquiry. But rather than banning the rebuilding of housing on unstable land, section 641A acts to protect councils from claims.
Five years later, well-regarded New Zealand engineers Nick Rogers and Don McFarlane wrote a paper warning about the long-term effects of 641A.
Brook, associate professor and director of the master of engineering geology degree at the University of Auckland, says Rogers and McFarlane largely predicted what might happen in the future.
“It has played out in several places because people will build on unstable land, developers will develop it.”
Repetitive slips like Remuera’s Shore Rd and those at Muriwai are a legacy of that 1980s legislation, he says. After this year’s floods, a drone won’t have to fly too far to find the angry yellow-brown scars down Auckland’s cliff faces. And there’s a lot of coastline, and cliffs, to consider – 3200km of it that includes the Waitematā, Manukau and Kaipara harbours. Those cliffs are part of the East Coast Bays Formation which underlies much of the Auckland region, stretching all the way to Whangaparāoa. It’s renowned for its deep residual soil that forms, over time, on top of the layers of sedimentary rock.
That deep soil is often what people build on and that’s what slides down cliffs, with some loose rocks mixed in, once it becomes saturated, taking people’s houses, retaining walls and swimming pools with it. Memories are short and the cliff gashes are soon covered with undergrowth. But researchers don’t have to delve too deep into Auckland’s files to uncover similar stories.
As far back as the 1920s, photographer Leo White, who once worked for the Herald, was taking aerial shots of Auckland and, after learning to fly, launched Whites Aviation in 1945. He systematically photographed much of New Zealand from the air, including foreshore slips like ones in the 1950s and 1960s that caused houses to slip down the cliff at Glendowie’s Karaka Bay. Distraught residents were no longer allowed in their homes and one slip was so large it divided the once-long Karaka Bay into two smaller beaches permanently.
In 1981 motorists on the Northwestern Motorway gawked up at a gash on a hillside in Grey Lynn after it suddenly slid away, taking multiple houses with it. Resident Graeme Collie, whose Shirley Rd apartments were demolished as a result, became embroiled in a long-running dispute with the then Auckland City Council, claiming negligence on its part. He discovered the council had known the site was unstable since 1951, having already suffered one slip, but still allowed him a building permit in 1964.
In 2008 the former Mayor of Manukau City, Sir Barry Curtis, described the sound of breaking glass and loud cracks at 2am as the cliff edge slipped away beneath his Bucklands Beach home. His and several other houses were red-stickered. In 2017, after heavy rain, an avalanche of mud slammed into the back of the San Remo apartments near Kohimarama Beach from the cliff behind, causing a late-night evacuation of residents.
Cliff-top residents perched along Auckland’s North Shore coastline have nervously peered over the edge for years, wondering if more earth and rock have slipped away overnight after heavy rain.
Decades ago people built in the wrong places out of ignorance, experts say. But now, with a body of evidence building up, why do we not learn from bitter experience?
Developers are still building apartment blocks close to a cliff edge, homeowners are still building pools too far forward, Brook says.
“This is happening all around Auckland still. The council can only do so much.”
He has some sympathy for the council, saying it is “between a rock and a hard place”. The council needs to encourage building to solve the housing shortage, and to collect rates to keep the city going. But it also needs to be seen to be responsible, restrict building in treacherous places or put warnings on LIM reports. That sounds straightforward but not in the face of strong opposition from residents, ratepayers and developers – and more importantly, voters.
Auckland Council has top-class scientists, geologists and engineers working for it, Brook says, but trying to incorporate that science into workable policy is difficult because of competing interests.
“You’ve got commercial interests, private property owners and developers working against them. With our obsession with houses, nobody wants something dodgy on their LIM report. And people do take council to court to get things removed from their LIM.”
In 2012 the Kāpiti Council put erosion warnings on the LIM reports of 1800 coastal properties. Local residents rebelled, and the Coastal Ratepayers United (CRU) took the council to court, claiming the science was dodgy, and that the LIM warnings would lower property values and make it difficult to get insurance. CRU lost the case but the following year the council backed down and removed the warnings after an independent panel found the science wasn’t robust enough.
Apart from restricting rebuilds in high-risk areas, “managed retreat” or buyouts will be the next issue with which councils will need to tussle. How will that be managed, Brook questions?
“Who is going to be bought out, who’s going to pay for it, and how will it be decided? These are all the burning questions.”
University of Auckland professor in sociology Steve Matthewman told the Weekend Herald that a process of managed retreat needed to start now.
“You don’t want to put people in the face of known catastrophic risk. If you think about some of these places in Auckland – some of these places at the bottoms of cliffs and tops of cliffs that have been red-stickered – it’s highly unlikely anyone would sanction rebuilding there – it’s just too dangerous. It’s the same in Muriwai. Those cliffs are just too unstable.”
Matthewman, a specialist in disaster studies, says moving entire at-risk communities that have not yet experienced a disaster will be challenging. He predicts a tightening of local government planning policies and legislation in hazard-prone places, including coastal areas, areas close to rivers, flood plains and cliffs.
Although rising sea levels and coastal erosion may be straightforward to gauge, potential slips depend on a wide range of factors and are not always easy to predict.
For a start, there are more than 30 different types of landslides, and conditions vary across streets and cities, Brook says.
“There are so many site-specific factors that control the amount of water required to cause a soil slope or rock slip or fail.”
For that reason, building setback distances are difficult to calculate. A conservative rule of thumb could be three times the height of a cliff, which would mean a setback distance of 90m above a 30m cliff. And setback distances would need to be set at the foot of cliffs too. But whether, over time, the council can stop developers building apartment blocks with multimillion-dollar sea views on the top of cliffs, or wealthy homeowners building infinity swimming pools near the edge, remains to be seen.
Faced with the fallout from massive flooding and slips in the Auckland region, the council would not be drawn on whether it would make it harder for people to build on potentially hazardous sites or too close to the edge of a cliff. Nor will it comment on whether property owners will be allowed to rebuild on sites that are prone to slips. John Duguid, the council’s general manager, plans and places, says it is too early to determine what changes will be required.
The council is able to decline consent to build in certain locations that are considered hazardous in terms of land stability.
“However it would only do so after carefully assessing the specific circumstances from a geotechnical engineering perspective,” Duguid says.
The council is now considering an urgent report commissioned last month to look at the medium and long-term impacts of the flooding, and how changes to planning and regulations could be approached.
In an opinion piece in the Herald this week, the Mayor of Auckland, Wayne Brown, blames bad decisions in the past, including by the Environment Court, poor building technique choices, lack of investment in stormwater. Brown says the council needs to be able to say “no” to building applications in at-risk areas, and for the decision to stick.