Steamrollered out of business

Antony Gough after last September's quake. Photo / Herald on Sunday

These are uncertain times for central Christchurch building owners. Antony Gough owns around a dozen properties in the cordoned-off CBD, including two hotels.

This week he had to give redundancy notices to his 40 staff at the Poplars Apartment hotel and Oasis restaurant at the corner of Madras St and Chester St East.

"It's awful. You work with these people probably for 10 years.We have been building this business up. We've just spent a fortune on upgrading."

But he is really angry about the demolition of three of his buildings. Gough knew numbers 80-86 Hereford St were probably had it - they had been badly damaged in the September quake.

But he says the buildings, which housed Vivace Espresso Bar and Fortuna Books, were bulldozed over the weekend without his consent.

Valuable items such as servers, tools, Vivace's handmade coffee equipment and a store of furniture are now demolition dust. Gough says he registered online, as instructed by the authorities, but was not told a thing.

"Our rights have been steamrollered," he says. "The problem is the emergency legislation allows them to
act as a dictator."

He doesn't yet know what this means for his insurance cover. "If it was able to be saved, do I have insurance?" Property Council chief executive Connal Townsend says at this stage it's a"non-question" to ask how much it will cost to rebuild the CBD and whether insurance will cover it.

"Until we have physical access to the entire CBD we will never know the value of the existing stock, and we will never be able to assess that value against the original market value or against an estimated rebuild value."

The council's engineering members say removing the rubble alone could take six months. Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee makes no apology for the demolition of unsafe buildings.

"There's a whole lot of people I think not appreciating that there is a state of civil emergency in existence at present and we need to move quickly. And if they can't move with us then decisions have to be made in favour of public safety."