Muriwai home owners still unsure how flood buyouts to be calculated

One hundred Muriwai homeowners now have the all-clear to return to their homes, more than six months after Cyclone Gabrielle tore through the west Auckland community.

But dozens of others, including a family who have lived in a caravan all through the winter, still wait to learn of their fate.

After lengthy geotechnical investigations, Auckland Council downgraded the coloured placards on more than 50 Muriwai properties, and assigned 100 with low-risk categories, allowing people to begin the big clean-up.

The Muriwai Lodge, better known to locals as the Top Shop, had been a mainstay of Motutara Rd for 100 years.

In 2019, it was put up for sale and lay dormant and derelict until a new owner took the reins.

After months of hard work, Clare Bradley had the lodge and its six cabins back in action by December 2021.

"It was intentionally a sort of community hub: a music studio, an artist studio, some longer-term residents.

"It was a really lovely place to live."

But just over a year later, all its residents had to evacuate as Cyclone Gabrielle brought landslides tearing through the north side of the section.

This half of the property was now a bombsite with cabins teetering over the edge of a cliff, neighbours' cars lying wrecked after rolling down the hill above, debris from the slip piled high, fragments of trees everywhere, and silt hardened underfoot.

The site was directly across the road from the slip that took the lives of two local firefighters who were trapped inside a house during the cyclone.

Although the damage from the landslide is still evident, Auckland Council told Bradley her property was now considered low-risk and placed it in category 1.

Her red placard had also been downgraded to yellow, meaning she could use the unscathed lodge and store while she made the rest of the property safe.

Bradley was still coming to terms with the sheer volume of work ahead of her, with truckloads of rubble needing to be cleared before she could even think about restoring water and power.

However, she was optimistic about the future of the land, and said she could imagine it becoming a meeting point for the community once again.

Across all of Auckland, council had now placed 215 properties into risk categories.

There were 146 properties in category 1 - 100 of them in Muriwai.

Three properties had been placed in category 2, which could see owners return to their homes if risks were resolved.

A further 24 were deemed unsafe to live in and assigned category 3, meaning they would likely be offered buyouts.

However, the owners of 42 properties had only been told their properties were either in category 2/3.

Motutara Rd resident Lachlan MacKinven was one of them.

"That's really not the news that I was hoping for. I was hoping that we would get told that we could go home."

MacKinven had been toughing it out in a caravan with his five-year-old daughter and dog all through winter.

"Doing the laundry, washing dishes, cooking a meal in the caravan - everything just takes so much longer.

"It's fun when you camp for a couple of weeks but it's quite tough when you try to live in a single room for six months or more."

MacKinven said the extra stress had taken its toll, and he and his daughter had been sick with colds and flu.

He said receiving an unresolved category was worse than category 3.

"That would break our hearts to lose our home, but at least we would have some closure and we would know what was coming next.

"A category 2/3 is sort of like saying we just need to wait longer, and I feel like that's all we've been doing, is waiting in limbo for seven months."

Although his house was 100 metres away from the Muriwai Lodge, there were no slips directly affecting it.

He said council suggested the house could be moved further away from the slope at the back of the property, but this would not be straightforward.

"It's a 70-year-old house with a concrete floor. I just don't know how feasible it is to pick a house like that up.

"Bigger question: who pays for that? Because I don't have a budget to relocate my house."

A question he would be taking up with the council, as Muriwai residents gathered at the surf club on Tuesday night to voice their concerns about the decisions that would determine their future.

Auckland Council group recovery manager Mat Tucker said the council was working through assessments for about 1800 homeowners who had registered to be part of the property categorisation process.

"As 215 homes have already received a category, there are around 1600 registered properties still to be categorised as of 29 August.

"However, registrations are still open, and we encourage anyone who hasn't registered yet may be high risk to do so."

'Nothing's definite yet' - Auckland councillor 

Auckland councillor Maurice Williamson chairs the Revenue, Expenditure and Finance Committee that is overseeing the buyout process.

He told Checkpoint it was a "very complicated process" and could be running "till the end of the year".

It was necessary to work out how much central government and council would need to put in towards the buyout.

"We've finalised on a 50/50 deal, which is great."

He said categorising the houses was a challenge; not just the ones that were damaged, but those that could potentially be at risk from a cliff or in a flood plain.

"It's very hard for the residents ... I get that it must be heartbreaking for some of them but it's one of these issues that's going to take some time to get to the end of the line."

He said council would need to ask the public for feedback, if they were happy for it to spend on this buy back.

"I believe we'll get to a reasonable place on that. The details are yet to be ironed out."

The formula needed to be "reasonably transparent" for everyone.

He could not tell when the homeowners would be told of their houses' fate, citing going into the new year.

"No one can tell. This is all new uncharted territory ... because there are so many moving parts, so many people needing to be involved ... making that final decision.

"Nothing's definite yet."