Sheryl Clarke, 82, was rescued from her home in Birkenhead during the Auckland Anniversary floods. Photo / Sylvie Whinray
A year after a terrified elderly woman was rescued when raging floodwaters engulfed her North Shore home, her children want to know why the house is still not fixed and why their insurance company has not paid out. Jane Phare reports.
It’s been a year since Sheryl Clarke waded through knee-deep water to escape torrents of water that ripped the deck from the back of her Birkenhead house, leaving it right on the edge of a ravine.
She’s frail, suffers from mild dementia and just wants to go home. Clarke, 82, and her adult children think Tower Insurance, Toka Tū Ake Earthquake Commission (EQC), Auckland Council and Watercare haven’t got their act together since the Auckland Anniversary floods. The force of the water tore a huge chunk of Clarke’s back section away, sending a large deck, attached to the second storey of the house, crashing into a flooded gully 10 metres below. Her home is red-stickered, too dangerous for tradespeople to enter until a major landslide at the back of the house is fixed. And Watercare won’t repair broken water and sewage connections below until the land is stabilised.
But that’s the problem. EQC has offered just $150,000 for loss of land up to eight metres from the house but the cost of remediation, including a large retaining wall, has been quoted at twice that, excluding the cost of new drainage. Clarke, who has no savings, can’t afford the additional $150,000 needed to make the land, and therefore the house, safe.
Tower says its assessors think the house is fixable, but tradespeople aren’t allowed to enter while the property is red-stickered. Clarke’s family disagree with Tower’s assessment. With water still flowing under the home’s foundations and cracks appearing in the land, they say the property is unsalvageable. They want Tower Insurance to pay out the $1.14 million the house alone is valued at in terms of replacement so their mother can be rehoused.
The day the pensioner found herself trapped upstairs in her Chatswood home, record rainfall dumping on Auckland turned a trickling stream in a bush-clad gully below into a raging river, mixed with sewage, eventually rising up Clarke’s section. Adding to the deluge was stormwater pouring down from the street above.
With the lower level flooded, the only way out of Clarke’s home was through a ranch slider opening onto a portion of the deck still clinging to the house.
One of her daughters, Kim Weston, and granddaughter Harmony drove through blinding rain to rescue Clarke, shouting instructions through the thunderous noise to her frightened mother standing in the doorway, hoping the deck would hold her weight.
Clarke hasn’t been back to the house since that day. “Keep out” tape blocks the driveway and a now-familiar Auckland Council red sticker forbids entry to the property.
“Huge landslide at the back of the property on the eastern side,” the sticker warns. “House foundations undermined. No entry to the whole site.”
The warning is no exaggeration. The washing line Clarke used on her back deck now hangs high above the ravine. Way below is the deck, the outdoor furniture still sitting on top.
The family understands that Clarke can’t return to her home in its current state. What they don’t understand is after a year, in which they have collated a dossier of hundreds of emails, phone calls and multiple site visits by contractors and assessors on behalf of EQC, the council, Watercare and Tower Insurance, no one appears willing to take responsibility and no progress has been made.
A contract engineer who visited Clarke’s home in the days after the flood and landslide told the family that water was coming up from the ground under the concrete slab foundation. Council engineers who inspected the property in the past two months advised the family that cracks had occurred on the land and that a sinkhole had formed at the front of the house, evidence of water flowing under the house.
Family members, allowed into the house briefly to salvage Clarke’s family photos, say the interior had deteriorated further with evidence of water damaging a concrete wall downstairs, cracking and a door that swings open indicating the house is tilting.
A year on, they are still no clearer about who will pay what and when, whether the house is fixable, or even safe in the long term, or whether Clarke’s property will be eligible for a Category 3 buy-out by the council.
Weston fears her mother won’t return to her home until it is too late.
“You don’t have time for this, do you Mum?” she says to her mother during the Herald’s interview.
In the meantime, Clarke has been staying with Weston in her Birkenhead home, her own possessions and clothes trapped in her home. She is still paying rates on the property, and a contractor to mow the front lawn, from her pension. Added to that, Clarke is paying Tower Insurance premiums that went up two months ago from $170 a month to $238 a month after Tower increased the value of home (excluding the land) from $898,000 to $1.14 million.
Weston says her mother has paid premiums to Tower for the past 36 years she has lived in the house and has never made a claim. She has no residual funds to fix the unstable ground and the house. Where is Tower when her mother needs them, Weston wants to know?
Clarke’s son John, who lives in the US, says the family is extremely frustrated by the “bureaucratic stalemate” that has left his mother without a home and with a house worth nothing in its current state.
“Our mother is a vulnerable person with limited resources and deserves better than this.”
The family says the situation has resulted in their mother feeling powerless, anxious and sad, and has caused a notable decline in her physical and mental health.
The Herald approached all four entities with a list of questions about Clarke’s case. All four acknowledged her predicament was stressful and difficult.
Tower Insurance did not answer some specific questions but issued a statement on behalf of the company’s chief claims officer, Steve Wilson, saying the company realised how difficult the past year had been for Clarke and her family and that its assessing agency had been in regular contact.
“Mrs Clarke’s claims were fast-tracked and her property was first assessed two days after the floods and an emergency accommodation benefit paid within three-and-a-half weeks,” he said.
Clarke’s flood damage was a two-claim process - the damaged land covered by EQC (under a scheme called EQCover) and the cost of the damage to the house covered by Tower, in this case less than the sum insured for the house.
“In those instances, customers receive their EQCover settlement separately and we pay per the policy wording for the actual damage to the property.”
“We look forward to being able to progress their claim further once the family give us clearance to,” Wilson said. “We would like to find a resolution for our customer and will reach out to again to set up a time to meet in-person and go over the EQCover and Tower claim.”
Weston says Tower doesn’t need clearance to progress the claim and the family has not put the claim on hold. However, she acknowledged they are in a stalemate with Tower because the family has not accepted the $150,000 EQC offer, which is not enough to make the land and the house safe. And the family has been told the house is too unsafe for tradespeople to enter until the land has been remediated, which means Tower won’t fix the house until then.
“If she [Clarke] hasn’t got enough money to fix the land, the house remains unliveable and she remains homeless. So we’re caught,” Weston says.
“To say that the house is fixable when the land underneath makes it unliveable is ludicrous. They just need to do the right thing.”
Her message to Tower is: “You have to write it [the house] off, combine with EQC and pay mum the money so she can find a house that’s livable. That’s the ethical thing to do.”
EQC referred most of the Herald’s queries back to Tower, saying the insurance company was managing the claim on its behalf. EQC’s head of readiness and recovery, Kate Tod, said the amount EQC can pay out is laid out by its governing legislation.
She acknowledged the uncertainty and stress for homeowners still navigating insurance claims as a result of the North Island’s severe weather events.
“Land claims, especially for damage from a landslip, can be complex and take time to work through.”
Restricted access, for example red-stickered properties, made the work more difficult for specialists like geotechnical engineers.
“However, it is important to get the process right as mistakes could lead to further stress, delays and frustration for homeowners,” Tod said.
Of 8420 EQCover claims received by early this month as a result of Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland floods, 5866 had been settled through EQC’s partnership with private insurers, she said.
Early on, assessors told Clarke that Watercare would contribute to the cost of remediating the land because it needed access to fix a public wastewater pipe destroyed by the landslide. But a pre-arranged online meeting in October last year was cancelled and Weston says she has been unable to engage with Watercare since then.
In a statement to the Herald, Suzanne Lucas, who heads Watercare’s flood recovery programme, said a temporary wastewater bypass had been put in place to service neighbouring properties.
While there was uncertainty surrounding the future of Clarke’s property and whether it could be made habitable again, Watercare was unable to progress plans for a permanent solution, she said. The meeting with Weston was not rescheduled as there was little Watercare could do until the future of the property was established.
Watercare would cover the costs of any reinstatement needed as a result of the work, however it was not responsible for remediation of the property itself.
“This is a matter for the property owner, their insurer and the Earthquake Commission.”
Clarke’s home is also currently being assessed by the council’s Tāmaki Makaurau recovery office, set up in response to last year’s extreme weather events. The family could be eligible for a construction grant, and a design and consent grant, to help the costs. In the event of a Category 3 buyout, the amount would be based on 95 per cent of the insured property’s value, less any insurance payout including the EQC contribution.
Group recovery manager Mat Tucker said the office now had 2500 homes to assess in detail while investigating community infrastructure projects that would help reduce risk to neighbourhoods. So far more than 1500 desktop and 1100 onsite assessments had been completed and 530 categories for homeowners had been finalised. Of those, more than 90 homes were now eligible for a voluntary buyout as Category 3.
It had been a challenge to get the right technical expertise to do the assessments but the council had increased the number of contractors, and used experts from other regions and Australia to boost its efforts.
“I know this is taking longer than people would like, but it’s about safety so we need to get it right. These decisions will also signal the future liveability of a home and community, and inadvertently impact things like future insurability too,” Tucker said.
Weston has suggested various options to Tower, including moving her mother’s house further up the section away from the slip, rebuilding on the site or buying a similar house in the same area. She claims she gets no response.
As far as she’s concerned, a meeting to “explain” why Tower is not paying out is pointless.
“We’re not stupid. We understand what they’re hiding behind. It’s just not acceptable.”
Jane Phare is a senior Auckland-based features and investigations journalist, former assistant editor of the NZ Herald and former editor of the Weekend Herald and Viva.
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