Watching anxiously as flood waters threatened her Riverhead home in the early hours of a cold winter morning, Jo Bower felt sure her family was going to have find somewhere else to go.
"I just stood there and said to my husband Neil, 'what are we going to do, where will we go'? You couldn't see the back lawn. It was covered in water and over the fence I could see water everywhere; the whole area looked like a massive swimming pool."
But the family got lucky. Around 3am the rain eased off enough to prevent more serious flooding and the couple were able to go back to bed. "I guess the weather gods thought 'ok, we've given these guys a fright, now it's time to stop'."
The horror of that August night has stayed with her. The flooding began with a massive rainstorm that battered Auckland, hitting west Auckland particularly hard.
Fifty homes were evacuated and Kumeu, a township just 5km from the Bowers home in Riverhead, was cut off after copping 201mm of rain in 24 hours, the area's second wettest day since records began in 1943.
The Bowers first became aware something was wrong the night of the flood when they were woken by their daughter Aisha about midnight after she heard gurgling noises coming from plumbing in the bathroom.
"We had actually heard the rain before we went to bed," Bower says. "Neil had taken the dog out and noticed there was a lot of water on the lawn."
But because the Bowers had had no problems following drainage work undertaken on their section a couple of years before, they didn't think much of it, closed the door and went to sleep.
A few hours later all that changed. "Aisha heard the water backing up the piping and we looked outside and all we could see was water. There is a creek at the bottom of our road and the cluster of drains in the area were clogged with debris and rubbish; the water had nowhere to go, it was like a perfect storm."
Thinking they might have to evacuate, Bower rushed around putting anything of value in the house up higher.
Although Bower says their home escaped intact, they lost all their carpet after the flood waters seeped in to the underlay. They also suffered damage to some household furniture and equipment including a lawn mower and water blaster - both of which were completely under water in the garden shed.
But the experience has made Bower thankful for their home and contents insurance which they have had with AMI for nearly 15 years. She estimates they suffered damage worth between $25,000 -$30,000.
"The person I dealt with at AMI was so good. All the carpet was replaced and everything involved in our claims was made so easy for us.
Bower has nothing but praise for how AMI handled their claims. "It (the flood) was very stressful, especially coming while we were in a Level 4 lockdown, but it was all so easy dealing with them.
"The carpet people came in the next day and set up these big fan blowers to dry the floors," she says. "We were even compensated for the power the blowers used; it was not something I would have even thought of."
AMI's statistics show that in the 2020-21 financial year, they helped customers with over 170,000 house, car and contents claims, paying out almost $390m. This included more than $100m paid out in house claims and over $56m for almost 30,000 contents claims.
The most common contents claims were for broken windows – more than 10,000 customers had glazing replaced. However, as the latest climate change reports indicate, wild weather is an increasing problem for New Zealand homeowners and as a result AMI paid out just over $29m for weather-related damage like hail, wind and snow in the 2020-21 financial year.
For more information go to: www.ami.co.nz