1News reporter Logan Church has been investigating the fallout from the recent Auckland floods, and what can be done to save parts of our biggest city.
For Louis Fulford, the January 27 flood destroyed almost everything she had.
When 1News visited her property at Waimoko Glen, Swanson, she was cleaning out the rest of her furniture. Almost everything was gone — although she was trying to save the Rimu coffee table.
She described being "mesmerised" by the rising floodwaters, that quickly began rushing into her lounge.
"I eventually went next door, because it was evident, I couldn't stay here," she told 1News.
"The street was blocked off by floods at both ends — I couldn't drive out."
Fulford's property is only one of more than a dozen that flooded on January 27.
"It's lucky someone didn't die, because we’ve got some older people at the end of the road," Thomas White said, a resident at the end of the cul-de-sac.
He raced his pregnant wife out of the area as the floodwaters rose. When he opened the garage door to try and get the car out, the floodwaters surged into their newly purchased home like a "tsunami".
But flooding was not a new phenomenon for the street. Five properties were inundated in 2021.
This was not the only area dealing with complex flooding issues.
Elizabeth Jefferies lives in an in-fill housing development in Milford, on Auckland's North Shore.
1News first met her as the Student Volunteer Army helped carry out her destroyed fridge, couches and beds.
Like so many others, their possessions were piled at the side of the road waiting for the council to pick them up.
When 1News returned, the family were figuring out how to start repairing. But they were certain it made no sense to rebuild in the same way.
"It's just going to happen again and again," she said.
"We either need to look at raising the floor levels so it doesn't, or look at what Christchurch has done and these houses need to go."
It's a question that a lot of people are grappling with.
Many Auckland residents 1News have spoken to want to be effectively "red-zoned" and bought out by the council or central government.
Others want financial support to raise their houses off the ground. Some just want the insurance company to agree to raise their electric sockets 1m higher.
Others want better management of stormwater infrastructure and better maintenance of the existing streams.
"We've been here for the twenty-eight years — for the first twenty-six years we've had nothing like this before until the construction going on [up the valley]," Graeme Beaufoy, another resident at Waimoko Glen, said.
"I believe all of their drainage goes into my stream."
If nothing is done, however, these residents do know exactly what will happen.
"If we don't do anything," Jefferies said, "we'll be uninsurable, uninhabitable, and unsellable."
Tomorrow Logan Church interviews the man responsible for Auckland's stormwater network, asking why it failed, and what can be done going forward.
SHARE ME