Family watch as flood-hit home demolished

Vladi Vladev leaves behind the wreckage of his home, but vows to remain in Tauranga. Picture / Alan Gibson

Bulgarian immigrant Vladi Vladev watched stoically yesterday as his one-year-old Tauranga home was ripped to shreds, spewing out its mud-sodden contents.

A large excavator made short work of demolishing the three-bedroom house which, four weeks earlier, had been shunted 15m off its foundations by a landslide.

The home he helped to design, and which took four or five months to build, was "one hour - gone" said Mr Vladev, wiping his hands together in a dusting-off gesture. "It's quite scary, isn't it?"

Not surprisingly, the quiet lane at the end of Vale St in Otumoetai has lost its attraction for him, his wife, their wheelchair-bound daughter, 25, and 22-year-old son, who settled in New Zealand three years ago.

When their dream went bad it was "terrifying" and they do not want to keep reliving the nightmare by moving back.

"It was not a house, it was our home," Mr Vladev explained in halting English, as the digger repeatedly stretched its long arm and scooped up the family's worldly possessions at random.

A refrigerator door was tossed on the scrapheap, followed by the rest of the fridge and its contents.

A loaf of bread went flying, along with pots and pans and a kettle. The letterbox lay among the rubble and a fire alarm went off as it hit the ground.

Nothing was worth salvaging.

"What can you do?" shrugged the marine engineer.

His son's first car, a 1997 Ford Escort bought two weeks before the disaster, was earlier retrieved from the garage, still driveable. It is expected to be back from the panelbeaters this week.

Few other possessions were saved. Members of an Auckland-based urban search-and-rescue team managed to dig out the family photo album but gone are passports and other documents.

The Vladevs, who are now renting, will not rebuild in the pretty valley where other homes are awaiting their fate - be it demolition or upgrading - after they were engulfed by water and mud.

But the family will stay in "beautiful Tauranga". Before moving to New Zealand they had looked at photos of the city on the internet and decided "this is our town".

Now, said Mr Vladev, they must start from the beginning again.