"We got hit pretty bad," Jeff Rooney says of his property in the Lud Valley near Nelson. Photo: Supplied / Jeff Rooney
Two months after devastating floods hit Nelson, many homeowners are still waiting for assessments or working to fix slip-damaged properties so they can return home.
To streamline the claims process, insurance providers now assess, manage, and settle the entire claim - including the natural disaster insurance - on behalf of Toka Tū Ake EQC.
Central Nelson resident Andrea Warn has not gone back to work since the floods, instead becoming well acquainted with how to use a pickaxe and a mattock to break up rocks in slip debris in her backyard.
"My full time job at the moment is dealing with council, dealing with insurance and EQC and basically doing a clean-up - so every day I get up and I just clean up our property, rather than pay someone to do it."
Taking advice from council engineers and Toka Tū Ake EQC, Warn and her husband did not wait for the insurance payout, but went ahead and had 70 tonnes of slip debris removed from their backyard.
It cost $8000 but their house is now safe to live in.
"You also have to have the financial means to be able to do that remediation yourself in the hope that you are going to be paid further down the track with your insurance to cover that cost. We've jumped the gun so to speak but to get us back into our house that's what we had to do to."
Further north in the Lud Valley, a severe slip has meant no driveway access to Jeff Rooney's property for the last two months.
"We got hit pretty bad, we had a 220-metre-long major mudslide that more or less took out our property, three major slips across our driveway, then on our shared driveway we had a culvert taken out and at the very start of that driveway, our bridge was taken out."
Some of the damage at Jeff Rooney's property. Photo: Supplied / Jeff Rooney
The bridge has just been reinstated, which meant they could now finish repairing the culvert, which would enable access for heavy machinery needed to remediate the land.
"It's quite tough, the majority of the time we have more or less stayed busy with other things to keep distracted from it. If you sit down and look at it and think about it, it almost becomes overwhelming."
A 2018 independent ministerial advisory report recommended Toka Tū Ake EQC establish a claimant reference group.
Ali Jones chaired that group and said it put a claimant's lens over what EQC was doing.
She said the inquiry into EQC led by Dame Silvia Cartwright, the joint report of the chief ombudsman and the privacy commissioner into the Earthquake Commission's handling of information requests in Canterbury, and Christine Stevenson's report to the minister responsible for the earthquake commission all identified failings related to a lack of relationships and processes with the claimant.
Lessons from Canterbury earthquakes
Toka Tū Ake EQC chief executive Tina Mitchell said it was important that those with experience of navigating claims following a natural disaster were at the table.
"One of the most important things they need is really effective support and communication and we know that from the claimant reference group and from the last 10 years in Canterbury, even some of us are still dealing with EQC."
The move to streamline the insurance process was a step in the right direction, she said.
"Life doesn't stop, people have children, or elderly parents, or sickness within their family, there are financial challenges, work, all these things continue so to be able to have a process that you can trust and believe in and that you are not constantly trying to have to progress yourself."
But the claimant reference group was disestablished in 2020 and a national reference group was established to provide representative community input and feedback to EQC.
Mitchell said the national reference group was made up of 10 community representatives from a diverse range of backgrounds from around the country.
They had sought feedback from the group following the floods and were told that people found it helpful to have the drop in centre in Nelson after the flooding and printed information sheets about the EQC claim process.
The process had changed since the Canterbury earthquakes and now gave claimants one point of contact - their insurer, Mitchell said.
"All you need to do now is call your private insurer, that opens the door to EQCover but also your private insurance entitlements, then your private insurer will navigate you through the whole process, from start to end."
But following the Nelson floods, that was complicated by the fact that in some places the land was still moving, or at risk of moving, so properties could not be assessed until it had settled.
"This event is the most complex our geotech engineers have seen in over two decades, so the way we support people through that is by explaining the process and giving them clear communication about what comes next and letting them know what the timeframe for that will be."
There are now 29 homes in Nelson with red stickers and 91 with yellow stickers.
New mayor keen to lead recovery
Nick Smith Photo: RNZ / Rebekah Parsons-King
Nelson is facing a repair bill of between $40 million and $60m after the August floods.
New mayor Nick Smith said his number one priority as mayor was to lead the recovery effort.
He has called on the government for support and said the scale of these costs was beyond what Nelson ratepayers can afford.
The repair bill will cover roads and infrastructure and to restore Nelson's parks for community use again.
Smith said he would be discussing the repairs and funding with Minister of Emergency Management Kieran McAnulty, when he visits Nelson next Thursday.