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Former Manukau City mayor Sir Barry Curtis has been battling with his insurance company for four years over a crack in his cliff-top apartment at Bucklands Beach caused by a landslip.
Early on September 1, Sir Barry and partner Ann Sterling woke to what they thought was a
home invasion as that crack turned into hundreds more splits and windows shattered after another slip.
His apartment, two others attached to it - one of which Sir Barry also owns - and two houses on each side of the units have been condemned by the Earthquake Commission.
A wall was built around the Clovelly Rd houses and a walkway to the beach 27m below.
Sir Barry, who has been renting another house in Bucklands Beach, where he has lived all his life, had engineers assess his two units, worth about $1.5 million in total, about four years ago after a small crack appeared in one of them.
He lodged a claim - which he says is watertight but won't go into the details - with his insurance company after he was told the land under his house was slipping away.
He told the Weekend Herald that if the company did not pay up he was considering lodging a claim in the High Court in the new year.
"It is the most frustrating, difficult, challenging and appalling situation I have ever come across.
"Four years, indeed three years, indeed two years, indeed one year is far too long for a claimant to wait for the claim to be accepted.
"I didn't realise that when someone came along, namely God, and decided to take the property away and make it uninhabitable, I didn't realise that we would be confronted with an almost impenetrable wall established by the insurance company."
It is yet to be discussed what the claim would cover, whether it included the value of the house and compensation for the time it had taken the company to front up.
Experts have said saving the properties would involve erecting a palisade wall but it would cost more than $1 million.
Sir Barry and his neighbours were given less than two hours' notice to pack up their belongings and get out. Later that night a removal company was able to take most of Sir Barry's furniture from the building but he has not been allowed to return.
"We are debarred from entering the property by the Manukau City Council who have built a Paremoremo-type prison fence along the road frontage," he said.
"I try not to go up there too often because it's most distressing. Two hours after you're living peacefully in a house and you're told to get out of it, you've got to experience the trauma associated with that."
His apartment has also fallen victim to burglary with two hooded men spotted on security cameras stealing copper pipes about a month after the September slip.
Roy Goodyear and his mother Kathleen Clayton, who recently turned 90, rented the other unit from Sir Barry. The pair, who moved to New Zealand from Zimbabwe in search of a better life, were given just 20 minutes to grab their possessions and evacuate. Mr Goodyear - a cricket coach at King's College - is staying with friends in Pakuranga and his mother has moved to a retirement home.
"Those sorts of things you can't budget for, plan or expect," he told the Weekend Herald.
The owner of the third apartment, Stephen Wilton, who lives nearby, said he was also working with his insurance company over the matter.
The unit, which Mr Wilton bought in 2002 as an investment property, was being rented by a couple with two children. Manukau City Council group manager, environmental operations Carole Todd said engineers were monitoring the land on a weekly basis.
"Something is definitely going to happen. When and what, we don't know. The land is moving millimetres over several weeks.
"People can't return to their properties because of the danger and we ask that people stay away from the bottom of the cliff in case of loose stones coming down."
