Empty homes, rising bills and a lucky cat: Wellington’s slow flood rebuild
Saturday, 6 June 2026
Hannah Krutz finally has walls. Around the corner, Erin Grace enters her basement under lantern light. Both have neighbours unable to live in their own homes.
It will be seven weeks on Monday since a torrential downpour dumped on select parts of the capital with areas around Berhampore, Brooklyn and Island Bay hit with severe flooding while other areas escaped unscathed.
The Wellington City Council is describing it as a greater than one-in-250 year rainfall with storm water pipes designed for once-a-decade rain.
Life is far from back to normal on some of the worst-hit parts of the worst-hit streets, where nervous eyes looked to rainy skies this week as heavy rain fell again.
Emerson St, Berhampore, was where a woman had to climb into a cupboard over head-height to get out of rising April 20 floodwaters.
Read more:
Living in a flood zone: after dramatic escapes in the night, residents look to the future
In pictures: The damage wrought by the wild Wellington weather
It was the street, outside the same house, where the most famous image of the floods – a blue car left high-and-dry on a fence after waters receded – was taken.
That house remains empty. Work is under way but there is clearly a long way to go. Skip bins ‒ filled with flood-damaged personal effects, sodden and rotting insulation and plasterboard ‒ punctuate the street.
Erin Grace’s recently renovated Emerson St home is largely fine. But the basement, with a second bathroom and laundry, was underwater in the April floods.
She woke in the early hours to flashing lights ‒ not lightning, as she first thought, but cars bobbing in the street, their lights going berserk. The second step to her basement was underwater but it would soon be to the sixth or seventh. It was her blue car on the neighbour’s fence that made its way to the New York Times.
She and her family had only recently managed to return home.
“We couldn’t live here, because it’s been exceptionally cold,” she said.
Downstairs, rigged up for hot water and laundry, otherwise has no power. She has to venture down with a lantern. The wall linings have been cut to flood-height level.
Insurance had been fine, she said, but slow. The Wellington City Council had been slow to remove the silt that coated the street after floodwaters receded.
Ishvar Magan has lived around the corner of Royal St for 56 years. The “bang, bang, bang” he heard at 3.30am was the floating rubbish bins clanging together, audible over the hammering rain.
His neighbour, Hannah Krutz, bought her first home here 18 months ago. She woke in the early hours with her cat, Luther, alarmed by the rising hallway water, neighbours knocking at the door.
Luther bolted with Krutz in pursuit. Neighbours watched, certain Luther was gone, trying to call Krutz off. When waters receded, she found Luther alive, clinging to the top of a car tyre just metres from a drain he could have been sucked down.
Krutz counts herself lucky. The row of houses to her right remains uninhabitable, as do a number across the street. Parts of her house remained untouched.
But, like so many others, the cut wall lining shows the knee height at which the floodwaters peaked. Wednesday this week, when The Post visited, was a good day – her walls were being reinstated.
Insurance, it seemed, would stump up but she would be out of pocket with excesses, skip hire and the electricity bill to run seven dehumidifiers for 12 days.
If there were sour notes, they were with the council, which only recently removed the silt from the street and from where a parking warden came to check residents’ coupons despite many cars being written off and their replacements missing the coupons.
But the silver lining for all residents was their community. The neighbour who came out with a coffee machine early in the morning, the local school delivering baking, the woman who turned up with a dehumidifier and towels for a flooded car, the tradespeople on site as day broke on April 20, ripping out sodden wall linings and insulation before the rot set.
Again, early on Friday this week, Berhampore recorded the highest rainfall in Wellington when moist air from the tropics dumped on the city with 25.7mm falling in a single hour, compared with 77mm in an hour for the April floods. (The Wellington City Council has an even higher one-hour reading for April: 85.9mm.)
It appears Emerson and Royal St escaped but there was some surface flooding and reports of sewage on the streets in nearby Island Bay.
Krutz was up at midnight checking water wasn’t pooling in the streets. “[It] makes us all very nervous in the street each time there’s heavy rain these days.”
The Wellington City Mission became a place to stay for many unable to return home. The mission administered a mayoral relief fund, kick-started with $150,000 from the council and topped up with another $100,000 from the Government. Donations pushed it higher.
City missioner Murray Edridge said about half of that money remained and would likely be given out in the coming weeks. The mission was still managing about 206 households, affected to varying degrees ‒ some uninsured or underinsured.
“For people who lost everything, it is a long pathway to recovery. There will be some consequences for a long, long time,” Edridge said.
Caleb Hulme-Moir was one of those concerned early on Friday morning as heavy rain again lashed Berhampore, where he lives with his family, has two rental properties and is still cleaning up after the April deluge.
He was unscathed this week but sludge and water got into a bathroom, hallways and his daughter’s room seven weeks back.
From past experience he knew to act quickly and had builders, who were already working on the house, there within four hours removing damp lining board and insulation, limiting rot in the process.
“Insurance doesn’t care if you rip something out that is bad,” he said.
It meant he was able to stay in his house and one of his tenants was moving back in this week. But the other rental, with a “lounge like a swimming pool” in the early hours of April 20, had the walls off but any repairs were a long way off.
Seven weeks on, he can’t talk highly enough of his insurer, AA. He praised the council (though that could change if it was not open to talking about mitigation measures for his street), though was less glowing about council-owned Wellington Water which looks after pipes.
A council statement on Friday said 19 households remained in accommodation provided by the Temporary Accommodation Service with three more in the process of having accommodation found for them and three needing it in the future. Thirty-six property owners had requested rates remissions meaning they were uninhabitable for more than 28 days.
“What it means for people with uninhabitable homes will be a case-by-case basis. In many cases property owners will be working with their insurance provider and considering their options,” it said.
There were no record of cars ticketed on Royal St but, if anyone in affected areas got tickets, they could be appealed.
Teams did inspections or follow up road work on Emerson and Royal streets on April 20 and numerous other days since, the council said.
“Where we have been able to, we have prioritised consents where we believe they are due to flooding. Our efforts to do this are not unusual. Similarly, if someone needs an accessible shower or ramp to be released from hospital, we aim to prioritise it,” the statement said.
The council has a community meeting from 2pm to 4pm on Saturday at the Island Bay Presbyterian Church, 88 The Parade, for people affected by the floods. The forecast is for rain.