Families in limbo over cyclone-wrecked houses

Flood survivors who have been through hell are now waiting in limbo.

The high waters are dissipating and the mud is beginning to cake, but more than 750 people are thought to be in Civil Defence centres in Hawke's Bay alone. Many families are still waiting to hear if they will have a home to return to.

On Brookefields Rd in Pakowhai, between Napier and Hastings, a single storey cottage is the only home Gary Spence has ever known. His grandfather helped his parents get the house in the 1940s and he's lived there for almost eight decades.

Things looked so normal when he and his wife evacuated that Spence only took one change of clothes.

That was before the entire house was covered by floodwater.

"It's horrendous inside, it really is," he said.

"I still can't - every time I look in and go through it, I've been in three times - I just can't believe it. It's like the inside of a great big washing machine in there, it's just turned everything around and upside down and all over the place."

This is not an exaggeration; the fridge ended up on top of the stove, with the microwave wedged behind it up near the ceiling - which is still dripping.

The house is yet to be assessed by the council or insurance company and Spence is not even sure if it is safe to go inside.

"There's no sense in pulling furniture out," he said.

"The insurance lady said to me on the phone last night 'can you pull carpets up, I don't suppose you can', and I said 'no you can't pull the carpets up, it's just absolutely totalled'."

Just across the road, Meda and Bill Hawkins are trying to recover family heirlooms.

"We managed to shift some of our precious things upstairs," Meda said.

"The water just rose faster and faster. It was right up to the second storey and we piled what we could on the beds up there."

The house was yet to be assessed, but the couple was hopeful their home of 45 years would be salvageable, even if the contents of the bottom storey were not.

"All of the windows are now jammed, you can't open any doors, any windows or anything like that," Bill said.

"It's going to be a long haul, but hopefully we can remediate the damage that was done to the ground floor level and the second storey level."

Napier City Council said it was too early to say how many houses had been condemned, but the Hastings District Council said it had so far red-stickered 35 buildings, meaning they were too unsafe to enter.

Entry to a further 330 buildings, which were yellow-stickered, is restricted.

The council had brought in more than 20 additional inspectors from around New Zealand, it said, and so far had looked at houses in Puketītiri, Puketapu, Waiohiki, and Twyford.

But in Pakowhai, residents still do not know if they have a home to return to.

Back on Brookefields Road, at Kerry Goldfinch's house, the floods reached eye-level. Volunteers were busy pushing out mud and stripping the house's interior, but the home was among the many yet to be assessed and Goldfinch said she did not know if all the work was for nothing.

"We have to do something, otherwise the contamination just gets worse," she said.

"They could do one comm every day, just an update - we're in Pakowhai today, we're in Eskdale today or whatever, but at the moment you just try and ring and you get nothing."

Meanwhile, more than 750 Hawke's Bay residents are thought to be still staying in emergency shelters.

Hawke's Bay Civil Defence Emergency Management said it was looking at longer term accommodation options, but people in emergency shelters who had nowhere else to go would be moved into short-term housing, like motels, as an interim measure.

"At the same time, we are working with iwi-Maori, Pasifika, MBIE's Temporary Accommodation Service, Ministry of Social Development and councils on a wide programme of work around housing and support," the agency said.

"This is a challenging problem, but it is a priority."