Peter Johnstone<\/a>.<\/p>\nHe stood on the roof of his house the night Pakowhai flooded, and felt creaking and groaning and feared the roof would collapse. Two weeks on, he was shocked to learn the insurer planned to fix his home.<\/p>\n
“The people that are there to assess are sort of saying, ‘Oh no, this is rebuild, this is a refix’, refix is the word they’re using,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I said, ‘You be kidding me, the whole bloody lot could be condemned, Pakowhai should be condemned’. Every house in Pakowhai is munted.”<\/p>\n
He is 75 and together with his wife has lived on the four hectares for three decades.<\/p>\n
“It’s just daunting for me – I’m not scared of hard work but it’s daunting for me. How on earth will I get that place back up?”<\/p>\n
They want out and have commissioned an independent engineer to determine if the yellow-stickered home is, in fact, a write-off.<\/p>\n
Also in Pakowhai, Keith Gore and his wife live between the two rivers and also want out. An assessor visited this week.<\/p>\n
“The assessor is out of Christchurch and he’s been in the game for 43 years,” Gore said.<\/p>\n
“He did the Christchurch earthquake, floods at Taeri, floods at Greymouth and one other, and when he walked in our house he said: ‘This is the worst I’ve ever seen’.”<\/p>\n
He was not impressed that the insurer wanted to scope costs to rebuild the silt-ridden house.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
SOURCE RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The country’s largest insurer says 20,000 homes across the country are at severe risk of flooding and it is in talks with government about where flood-damaged houses should be written off for good. IAG is part of an advisory panel that is helping the government with managed retreat legislation. Those in regions hard hit by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":3486,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3485"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3487,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3485\/revisions\/3487"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}