Mark Griffin at his home after the Momutu Stream overflowed and caused flooding in January. Photo: RNZ/Angus Dreaver
Mark Griffin's family has been torn apart after the Auckland Anniversary floods destroyed their home in Ranui.
It has been six months since the family last lived together under one roof. "My wife and one of my daughters is living in a caravan on the front driveway," Griffin said.
Another daughter was living at a friend's place, while his son was staying with the grandparents.
Griffin said he had a bed inside the "shell of the house", and living in a caravan was challenging. "If it's cold, we just have to use more blankets."
His wife had been suffering from a cold for three weeks. "At the moment we're just stuck in limbo, living off gas cookers and microwave meals and things like that."
In June, Auckland Council asked affected homeowners to fill out a flooding and landslide registration form. Griffin said he filled out the form hoping his property would qualify for risk category three - a voluntary buyout.
On 14 August, council confirmed it had started full site assessments and needed to get through 5000 individual property assessments. But Griffin was yet to hear anything.
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"It's extremely frustrating. We've had the insurance payout to do a reinstatement, but we can't do anything with that until we find out."
He said he was reluctant to rebuild. "We're in limbo at the moment. We need to know when, so we can move on with our lives, basically."
Auckland Council group recovery manager Mat Tucker said although the assessments had started, it was difficult to confirm when the process would be completed.
"We are almost having to go home by home to make those decisions.
"If you went along some of the streets in Auckland which flooded, I'm thinking of particular locations in Māngere for example, during the event the street would be flooded, you would be driving through water and all the gardens of the homes would be flooded.
"Afterwards, when you go and look at those homes to assess which categories they may be in, it's completely dependent upon the specifics of each of the homes in that street."
Photo: Supplied / Andrew McDowall
Tucker said while it looked like the impact of the flooding was the same on each, that was not the case.
"When you get inside those homes and begin to look at the floor levels one by one, the difference of when and how the homes were built and what the position of their floor levels in relation to the flood makes an enormous difference to their categorisation."
From next week, the council will be inspecting 250 properties for geotechnical issues. But a shortage of qualified professionals to complete the assessments was adding to the uncertainty around time frames.
"Of course, there's an added complexity in terms of resources or an added challenge that this isn't just an Auckland problem.
"It isn't just Aucklanders that are trying to find qualified people, both in flooding and geotech, to go and do these site visits and then analyse the information that we find.
"We're already having to use engineering resource from Australia to do some of our desktop analysis. Certainly the process is not measured in weeks, it's measured in months."
Advocacy group West Auckland Is Flooding chairperson Lyall Carter said while the affected homeowners understood council's restraints, they were frustrated because the community had been warning of the failing infrastructure for years.
"We understand why the process, you know, in a broad sense, is taking the time that it's taken, but that doesn't alleviate the huge pressure that people are under. People are fed-up that that they have been asking for years for streams and culverts to be cleaned."
Tucker said the recovery process in Hawke's Bay and Tai Rāwhiti could give Auckland residents a vague idea of what to expect moving forward. But Carter said whether that would be of comfort to Aucklanders was yet to be seen.
"There's a real sense of desperation and of anger that this project hasn't hasn't gone as fast as they have needed it to go."
He said he understood there were logistical delays.
"But on the other side of the coin is a community of people who have been displaced from their homes and from their communities and are living basically as refugees in their own city."