The City Gardens Apartments building has not had a warrant of fitness since 2017. Photo: RNZ / Lucy Xia
City Gardens Apartments in central Auckland was issued with a dangerous building notice last week due to fire risks.
The building's body corporate is confident that the notice can be lifted today and that residents won't need to move out.
Residents of the 16-storey apartment building were told by Auckland Council they would need to vacate the building by Monday 22 April due to significant fire safety risks.
Today, they will find out whether they need to leave their homes, depending on whether the issues - including defects with fire alarms and escape routes - have been resolved, and the building passing a council inspection.
RNZ understands that contractors have been brought on over the past week to fix the issues, with staff from several fire protection companies on site yesterday.
The body corporate's lawyer Tim Rainey told Morning Report he was confident the issues had been fixed, and that the dangerous building notice could be lifted today.
"Fire experts have assured me last evening that all of the work necessary to make the building continue to be safe for operation has now been done, and we're pretty confident this morning - when the council inspects we're going to have the notice lifted.
"But in any event, where things sit at the moment, I can assure the residents and occupants of the building that it's safe and they won't have to move out prior to Monday next week," he said.
The building has not had a warrant of fitness since 2017, and in August 2023, a fire and emergency audit found a raft of compliance breaches including inadequate fire protections between apartments and different levels, defective fire alarm and sprinkler systems and a low-pressure fire hydrant that would struggle to tackle fire on the upper floors of the building.
A more recent inspection by Fire and Emergency early this month found that a sprinkler had been set off in the building without triggering the building alarm or notifying fire crews, and car park stairs were open to potential car fires which could block the way of the apartment building.
The building was never compliant when it was first built, Rainey said ,and it had been subject to past litigation involving Auckland Council and developers over their negligence.
Rainey said the entire cost of remedial work on the building was estimated to be about $75m, and that there was a current shortfall of about $30m for long-term fixes to fire hazards and recladding.
Auckland Council's dangerous building notice noted that the building has a non-fire resistant cladding with a polyethylene core.
It said the cladding can pose a high risk to occupants due to the risk of uncontrolled fire rapidly spreading up the exterior walls.
It was similar to the cladding of the Grenfell Tower in London, where 72 people were killed in a fire in 2017.
However Rainy stressed that Auckland Council would not expect the cladding to be fixed in order for the building to pass the fire inspection today.
He said council recognised that was a longer term fix.
Rainy said the apartment was granted building consent in 2021 to begin recladding, but that there was not enough money to begin the work.
Auckland Council said it was working on remedial work with the building owners.
Council building consents manager Ian McCormick told Morning Report recent events at the building heightened council's response, including a sprinkler activation that did not trigger the fire alarm, and a door handle that had fallen off one of the fire doors.
McCormick said the building had a raft of maintenance, plumbing and fire protection issues over many years.
"It's just been ongoing issues for a long period of time...there's just been a range of different things that get addressed, and the new ones crop up, so it just leaves itself to major issues in terms of the way the building's been maintained,
"Yeah, we've had enough of it," he said.
McCormick said there was no other apartments in Auckland that had been issued dangerous building notices, but could not confirm whether there were other apartments that currently do not have a warrant of fitness.
However he assured that "we don't have any other buildings in Auckland like this".