Nearly 400 Auckland properties red or yellow-stickered

A police officer places a red sticker on a house on Shore Road Remuera after heavy rain caused landslips and widespread destruction across the Auckland Region. Photo / Alex Burton

Auckland Council is ramping up efforts to inspect up to 1000 flood-affected buildings a day.

A team of 130 specially trained Auckland Council staff is being joined by a group of engineers, retired inspectors, as well as inspectors from Kāinga Ora – Homes and Communities and other councils, including Tauranga, Hamilton and Wellington.

Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Fenz) and urban search and rescue teams are also helping, using drones to survey streams to check for blockages that can’t be seen from the ground.

Auckland Council’s general manager of building consents, Ian McCormick, told the Herald inspections of residential and commercial buildings began on Sunday morning in the most-affected parts of the city.

As of Monday afternoon, 77 properties had been red-stickered, 318 yellow-stickered and 743 white-stickered.

Red stickers deem a property unsafe to enter, yellow stickers restrict entry by only allowing people to enter a certain part of the building or by allowing them to go in temporarily to remove things, and white stickers mean there isn’t significant damage.

Owners of white-stickered buildings may still want to get their own checks done.

“Nothing about these assessments should take away the responsibility of the owner to make sure the building is safe to use,” McCormick said.

He clarified the stickers are legal instructions, not just advice.

He said those who want to query initial classifications or get help removing things from their buildings can contact the council for help.

“It’s not a question of, ‘Oh well, I’m never going to be able to get into my building’. We just want to make sure that when you do, you’re doing it safely,” he said.

“Prohibiting someone from entering their own building is a really big step. It has to be really bad for us to do that. We don’t want anyone to get hurt unnecessarily.”

McCormick explained the initial rapid building assessments take about 20 minutes.

Most of the time they can be completed from outside the building, without inspectors coming inside.

McCormick noted a key consideration is figuring out whether the building poses risks to adjacent areas.

He suggested building owners take photos of damage straight away and contact their insurers.

From there, they can organise their own builders or engineers to help fix their properties.

Auckland Council will have to recheck a building that has had work done on it to reclassify it.

McCormick warned that with the focus being on surveying damage to Auckland properties, some building inspections booked in for this week will be postponed.