Bleak City (53 page)

‘It means you shouldn’t rely on the engineering profession to help you,’ Alice said. She felt drained, all her optimism about the city’s future poured out, taking with it all her energy. She had no hope left to try and bolster up her mother. ‘The insurer will just brief their engineers to get the answer they want, and then when you get another opinion, they’ll just counter it and you’ll have to spend more money. They have deeper pockets than you do, they can go on like that forever.’

‘So our engineer’s report is just wasted money, then, isn’t it?’

‘No, it’s not,’ Alice said, shaking her head. ‘It tells you the state of the house and what needs to be done to repair it. It’s black and white, he’s taken into consideration the state of the house when it was new and proposed a repair to bring it back to that state, which is what your insurance policy says you’re entitled to.’

‘But we can’t get there, we can’t make them do what their policy says they’re supposed to do. I’d be happy right now if they’d just put it back to how it was on the 3rd of September 2010, and we’re not even close to that.’

‘The only way is a lawyer,’ Alice said. ‘That’s the only way to get your policy honoured now.’

Lindsay nodded slowly, colour draining from her face. She sat down on the sofa beside Alice. ‘That could be thousands. Tens of thousands. We can’t afford that.’

‘But if it’s the difference between a repair that renders your house worthless and locks you into, well, what Grandma and Grandad are having to go through, isn’t it worth it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lindsay said, her words slow. She turned to look at Alice. ‘Our only real hope now is that our complaint gets heard, isn’t it?’

Alice nodded, reluctantly. She leaned into her mother and put her arm around her. There was nothing else she could do.

Part IV: Bleak City

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

Any lingering doubts Alice had over abandoning her engineering degree had evaporated when IPENZ decided not to appeal CPEC’s decision in favour of the EQC engineer. IPENZ had folded its cards and walked away from the game, and minimising costs had won over doing what was right. What was the point of having a code of ethics if a client could brief an engineer in such a way that the duty of care an engineer had towards the public was reasoned away?

Why was no one standing up for Christchurch claimants? The EQC had lobbied CPEC to overturn IPENZ’s decision so that the EQC wouldn’t face a huge bill for having to revisit repairs. The opposition parties were nowhere to be seen, raising no questions over why the state-owned insurer was behaving the way it was. It seemed that legal action was the only way to get a claim sorted out fairly, which meant the fair settlement of a claim was out of reach for many people. It wasn’t right.

Even legal action was a limited option. The District Court heard disputes under $200,000 in value, which left only the High Court for anyone arguing with an insurer over a patch job versus a proper repair. Unfortunately, taking a case to the High Court was very expensive.

Because legal action looked like the only way forward for Lindsay and Kevin, Alice had looked at the list of High Court cases related to insurance issues that was published every few months. There was a separate earthquake court, meant to fast track homeowners through the court system, but when Alice read through the list, she wondered what being on the slow track looked like, since so many of the cases listed had been filed over two years ago. Judicial decisions were available on a government website, but hardly any had been handed down relating to earthquake claims. Were claimants giving up? That was definitely a possibility, Alice could see how exhausting the whole process was for her family. Or were insurers settling? If they were settling out of court, that meant they were largely in the wrong, because if they were right, why wouldn’t they let it get through the courts and set a precedent that would help them get all the other claims off their books? Alice was pretty sure the Bowens’ insurer was in the wrong, but how far would they have to go to prove it? Alice would do everything she could to help them pull all that information together.

There were a lot of cases against Southern Response on the list, and Alice was happy she no longer worked there. Everyone she had worked with was gone now, and every single one of them was happier for it, including Kylie, who had decided to go to polytech and do a construction management course. That was a surprising twist, Kylie had been so miserable over the whole rebuild towards the end of her time with Southern Response that Alice had expected her to leave Christchurch, if not the country. But there had been good things about the job, Kylie said, and she was interested in the building process, and if anything, her time at Southern Response had taught her how it shouldn’t be done.

Had Alice known about the coming earthquakes before starting university, she would have done law. She would be finished by now and able to help Lindsay and Kevin. But she wasn’t psychic, and in reality, she would simply be a year ahead of Sean, who was mired in running errands for more experienced lawyers and would be for another four years at least. That was how the profession worked, Andrew had told her, newly graduated lawyers didn’t become really useful until they had a good five years’ experience under their belts. How depressing.

There had been good news for Neil and Heather when the Government finally made new offers on red zoned bare land. They were offering 100 percent of the 2007 value. It was enough for Neil and Heather to decide to take the offer and move on. There were still the house repairs to deal with, but being able to put the section behind them seemed to lift a weight off Heather’s mind. They had waited so long for some resolution on their section, and it seemed the justice system had finally worked for someone in the city.

Neil and Heather had received their scope of works for their house, and although all the costs were blacked out, the scope had enough detail to help them make some progress with the EQC. Their foundation specialist’s report detailed the work that had been carried out on the foundations and it didn’t match what the scope of work said, so Neil called EQC and started pointing out the differences. The woman he spoke to had asked him to send in the information and they would have a look. Heather had taken that as another brush off, that once again no action would result. Neil insisted that the woman had been interested to hear that repairs on the scope hadn’t been carried out.

The findings of the survey of foundation repairs were finally released in the middle of August, and although EQC and insurers had been able to hand pick the properties that were surveyed by the Ministry, the results were overwhelmingly bad. Clearly Neil and Heather weren’t the only ones who had substandard repairs. Out of the 101 properties surveyed, a third of the repairs did not meet the required standard and would have to be redone. Even worse, three of the houses initially selected for the survey had been excluded because there had been no structural repairs, although the insurer had supplied documentation indicating that structural repairs had been carried out.

That sounded like fraud on the part of the contractors to Alice, but she was wondering lately if she was becoming paranoid from seeing what her family were going through with insurance companies and EQC. She ran the idea past Gerald.

‘There could be a reasonable explanation for it,’ Gerald said. ‘But fraud seems the most likely.’

‘What would be a reasonable explanation?’ she said.

‘Mix up with the paperwork,’ Gerald said. ‘You know what it’s like, trying to keep track of everything going on.’

‘Surely, though, if you’re invoicing for work, you’re going to make sure that work has actually been done,’ Alice said. She would be mortified to send a bill for work that hadn’t been carried out, and it would be queried right away by the customer. She pointed that out to Gerald.

‘Yes, but the rebuild isn’t a normal business environment,’ he said. ‘This Fletchers and EQC setup has cultivated secrecy in the name of commercial sensitivity, and there’s probably some contractors who’ve tried their luck. Bound to be.’

‘My grandparents were never allowed to see their scope,’ Alice said. ‘We’ve only recently seen a copy through the Official Information Act, and all the costs are blacked out.’

Gerald shook his head sadly. ‘There’s no need for that, not at this point when the work’s been done. And there’s no excuse for not telling customers exactly what work will be carried out, even if you do conceal the costs.’

‘This is bad news for Christchurch, isn’t it?’ Alice said.

‘Yes it is,’ Gerald said. ‘And you can guarantee that instead of figuring out how to put things right, EQC will be trying desperately to figure out how to shift the blame.’

EQC and the Earthquake Recovery Minister did quickly snap into damage control mode. EQC would be reviewing thousands of structural underfloor repairs, the Minister said on the six o’clock news that night. Kevin predicted that blame would be laid at the feet of builders. ‘It’s the bad scopes and the tight-arsed budgets that’ve led to this,’ he said, stabbing his finger towards the television. ‘Not to mention everyone and his dog clipping the ticket instead of keeping track of what’s going on.’

The next morning there was a follow-up article on
The Press
website in which the Minister said the Government would be going after the cowboy builders. That made Kevin laugh, and Alice could see he was trying not to be smug too early in the morning. ‘Just let it out,’ she told him. ‘You might hurt yourself if you don’t.’

Kevin was right, Gerald told her at work that day, it wasn’t the fault of builders at all. ‘Yes, people should speak up if they’re being asked to do substandard work,’ he said. ‘But the current climate hasn’t made it easy for them. If they don’t keep in good with the big players, there’s no work for them.’

In the days that followed, the finger-pointing continued. At a media conference, the chief of Fletcher Construction, the parent company of Fletcher EQR, said that the builders responsible for the substandard repairs would be asked to fix them at their own cost. If having the builder back on site wasn’t acceptable to the homeowner or if the builder had gone back to Ireland, then Fletchers would foot the bill. The Ireland comment unleashed the fury of Irish people living in New Zealand and even rated a mention in the Irish Times.

Builders were speaking up, but were doing so anonymously through the pages of the Christchurch Press. Workers who pointed out bad workmanship or warned homeowners that damage was being missed without the protection of anonymity had found that work dried up.

A drop in building quality was a known problem following natural disasters around the world. EQC had stated, after the first earthquake, that they recognised the potential for this problem and that getting Fletcher EQR to run the Canterbury Home Repair Programme would prevent it. What they had put in place was a regime that encouraged corner cutting and sloppy scoping and discouraged any builders who tried to do the job right. No, the builders weren’t to blame.

It had been five years since the first earthquake, and Lindsay could barely remember what their lives had been like before then. She remembered the months after the September quake clearly, the exhilaration over the city having dodged the bullet of The Big One because the quake occurred in the middle of the night. There hadn’t been crowds of people in the city to be killed or injured by the unreinforced masonry buildings that had been shaken apart by the force of the quake. They were lucky, she remembered people saying, herself included. That sense of blessedness had been crushed on the day of the February quake and still, four and a half years on, people were trying to make sense of what had happened to their city. Only now it wasn’t just the natural disaster they were trying to make sense of. There was also the bureaucratic disaster.

Just before the five-year anniversary of the September quake, the Government announced that the timeframe for making earthquake-prone buildings safe would be halved. It was good news, the legislation the Government was working on had initially allowed building owners fifteen years to make buildings safe, but now it would be seven-and-a-half years. The tightening of this requirement to make buildings safe was largely the result of the efforts of the only survivor of the Number 3 Sumner bus.

In the February quake, a building had collapsed onto the bus as it drove along Colombo Street, killing eight of the nine people on board. When the legislation was announced and the timeframe was stated as fifteen years, the lone survivor lobbied for a shorter timeframe. The risk to life of buildings with unattached parapets, chimneys and gables was simply too great to allow such a long timeframe, she argued.

A parapet had fallen onto the Number 3 bus because the parapet was not attached to the building. It was known before the February quake that the building had been damaged in the earlier earthquakes, and the survivor pointed out that it wasn’t the earthquake that had killed the others on the bus, but the building and the fact that its parapet hadn’t been made safe. It was, she said, a failing on the part of the building owner, for not making the building safe, and on the part of the City Council for not ensuring the building was made safe or, at the very least, fenced off.

She had made an interesting argument about the transfer of risk. As far as unreinforced masonry buildings were concerned, not enacting legislation requiring them to be fixed transferred the risk from the owner, who would need to spend money to upgrade a building, to the public. The most direct risk was to lives, those lost and those damaged. Indirect costs were in the form of taxes people paid to fund the public health system. Her own recovery from the building collapse had so far cost the public over $100,000. There had been several thousand injured in the quake, and who knew what the cost of that was, not just in terms of public money, but also in the effects on their lives and those of their family and friends. The risk had, indeed, been transferred from a handful of building owners onto the people of Christchurch.