Apprentices earning their stripes in Wairoa

Casey Aranui says she wants her students to find work after the rebuild.

by Kate Green, RNZ

Apprentice builders in Wairoa are earning their qualifications by repairing flood-damaged homes.

After homes north of the river were inundated by metre-high flooding during Cyclone Gabrielle, locals looking for work found it in the rebuild.

On Tuesday, more than seven months on from the storm, Casey Aranui’s crew was hard at work stripping wallpaper and gib from the walls of an uninsured, flood-damaged home on Ruataniwha Road.

Ms Aranui said they would put in insulation and replace the gib and plaster, leaving the previously uninsulated home warmer and drier than before the cyclone.

The crew was originally working on silt removal, but there was no shortage of housing repairs needed in the town.

Ms Aranui, a qualified builder and carpenter, said she travelled up from her base in Napier every couple of weeks to supervise the crew through her job as training facilitator at the Hawke’s Bay Jobs and Skills Hub, an offshoot of the Ministry of Social Development (MSD).

Under Ms Aranui’s supervision, the team of 12 men and women, of all ages and levels of experience, were employed by the building company Hookmade, and are nearing the end of repairs on their second and third flood-damaged homes.

The Wairoa District Council bought 2000 sheets of gib for the town, and insulation was bought by MSD.

But when the recovery work finished, Ms Aranui said she wanted her crew to find full-time jobs.

“I started writing a reference letter for these guys to explain the sort of work and the mahi they did, to give them something to show for what we’ve done with these houses.”

As a tutor for Te Pūkenga (formerly EIT), she began speaking with colleagues about their options, and eventually tailored a programme of unit standards to set them up for future employment.

Ms Aranui said she would hire them all in an instant.

“They’re real diamonds in the rough. I wish I could take them back home and give them employment.”

Their study was funded by the Wairoa Young Achievers Trust.

Its chief executive, and the town’s deputy mayor, Denise Eaglesome-Karekare said by the end of their training they would have sat assessments in health and safety, first aid and working at heights.

“We are short of labour, and so we’re trying to train our own, who are going to stay here for the long haul, to be part of everything.”

She hoped the apprentices would find work in the multiple housing developments already contracted to building companies around Wairoa over the next few years, with construction on the first due to begin later this year.

Recovery work would be ongoing too, she said, and is expected to take two to five years, so there would be plenty of work to go around.

Trainee Seth Walker, 19, said it was nice to see the happiness on the faces of the families whose homes they had repaired.

“I enjoy seeing the homeowners happy,” he said. “They’re mostly all my older family, so it’s brownie points for later on I suppose.”

He was keen to stay in the profession beyond the recovery —preferably in the construction of new homes for Wairoa.

“That’s what we’re going to try to move into after we clean up all the houses,” he said. “We’re going to try to move inside and get us some building jobs.”