All David wants back are the photos

All David Greaves wants is the chance to recover his cherished family photographs from his wrecked home in Otumoetai.
Ever since three landslides swamped his five-year-old house and pushed it against nearby pensioner flats, Mr Greaves has worried about salvaging the photographs of his two children when they were babies.
He may get his chance if the specialist Auckland-based urban search and rescue team goes ahead with plans to stabilise and then enter the house.
"If we get the photos I won't care about anything else," said Mr Greaves who is facing the prospect of losing two houses in the devastating flood.
Looking at the mass of mud and crumpled remains of his Landscape Rd house, Mr Greaves said: "I think I know where the photos will be. They are not that far in."
Mr Greaves was also hoping he could sift through the mud filling the garage and find his steel building tools that have been passed down through three generations.
"It's all memory stuff," he said.
David and Corinna Greaves have accepted that their wrecked home will be demolished and they will never return to live on the fallen section.
They also owned a little A-frame house in front and it was filled with mud and water.
"I think it got some protection from the family home but I don't know how damaged it is," Mr Greaves said.
He said he could never bring his children, aged 10 and 7, back to Landscape Rd.
"One minute they headed to school and they never came back to the family home."
They are now staying with Mr Greaves' mother.
"As it is, we are spending an hour each evening trying to get the kids to sleep. We have to convince them that the house they are in is not going to fall over."
Mr Greaves was at home waiting to go to work on the fateful Wednesday morning last week when the first of the landslides behind him started to rumble and fall.
Before then he had called his wife to come home urgently - and he rushed out and began digging a trench on one side of the property to drain the water.
"That seems futile now," he said.
The three landslides came from different directions. The first, from directly behind, moved the house off its 6m piles and down the section some 20m, the second turned it around, and the third pushed it against the flats. By then the house was destroyed.
At 11.30am David and Corinna Greaves made their dash. They put their dog on the back of the truck and drove to safety - but they left behind the ``fluffy'' pet cat.
"Before the first slip hit I looked out of the lounge window and saw a big tree sliding down. I grabbed my wife and took off.
"It's just total devastation - I can't really verbalise what has happened," Mr Greaves said as he looked at his crumpled house.
Marianne O'Halloran, an independent geo-technical engineer, said she had inspected a few demolished houses as a result of a landslide and Landscape Rd was the worst she had seen.
The mud had half submerged the house and she estimated there was five tonnes of pressure on the twisted roof.
She said the roof had dropped down the back of the house and was acting as a dam - "it has sealed everything off".
At the public meeting last evening, Mr Greaves specifically asked officials if there would be a chance to gather items from his home if it were to be demolished.
Mr Wynyard said the council and engineers were joining with Earthquake Commission officials today to produce a final engineering analysis on those 16 most severely effected homes and decide which would be demolished.