Bleak City (52 page)

Did the people of New Zealand want to know what was really going on in Christchurch? How people were being bullied into accepting insurance settlements that would leave them without enough money to fix their house properly? From what Alice said, that was what was going to happen to the Bowens. And unless Charlotte’s parents could find someone at EQC who was going to take their claim seriously, it was going to happen to them, too.

Lindsay collected the envelope from the letterbox on her way out at lunchtime. It was from the insurance company and contained a USB stick and a brief cover letter. She resisted the urge to go back inside and review its contents, there were simply too many other things to do that day. Lindsay was having lunch with her grandmother, and then they would do Grandma Bennett’s weekly shop. Then there were the kids to pick up from school, Kevin’s billing to get finished, dinner to make. So many things to do, and starting to wade through the insurance company’s files would have to wait.

That night, once the kids were off to bed, Lindsay finally started to examine the contents of the USB drive. What had arrived wasn’t a neatly put together summary of their house, the damage to it and the process of determining how to repair it in a manner that met their insurer’s obligation to them. It was a collection of files divided into two categories: files from their insurer and files from the insurer’s PMO, both in roughly chronological order. Figuring out what was going on with their claim was going to be like untangling a ball of wool. She would have to leave it until the next day. But first, before going to bed, she would have a flick through the largest file.

It was over five hundred pages long, but it looked like the place to start. It was a record of all the PMO’s communications, so included emails to Lindsay and Kevin, to contractors and to the insurance company. There was so much repeated material! Lindsay swore to always trim her own emails back to the bare minimum, no content nested to three, four, five, six levels.

At midnight, Kevin prompted her to stop for the day, to come to bed, but she was just starting to get her head around it all, so kept going.

Two hours later, her eyes were heavy and she was starting to have trouble following the threads of information, and not just because of the convoluted nature of the conversations. It was time to go to bed.

In the bedroom, she left the light off and changed into her pyjamas, trying not to wake Kevin. He needed to function the next day, but once she had taken the kids to school, she could crash if she needed to. She hoped not, though, she was noticing some inconsistencies between the dates she and Kevin were aware of things happening and when they had actually happened for the insurance company and the PMO.

The next morning, Alice offered to take the kids to school on her way to work, leaving Lindsay to start trawling through the information without needing to change out of her pyjamas. She could have taken the kids to school in her pyjamas, after all, she didn’t really need to get out of the car. But no, she wouldn’t let her life degenerate to that point. Pyjamas were home-time clothes only. That had been a difficult enough lesson to teach Olivia her first year of school without running the risk of provoking accusations of hypocrisy now that she was creeping up on those teenage years.

One interesting finding: the engineering report the insurance company had commissioned had been available several weeks before it had been passed on to Kevin and Lindsay. There were nearly a dozen emails over the course of the following month from a woman at the PMO asking their claims manager whether Kevin and Lindsay had responded and could she do anything to help speed up the process. Then one morning Bitterman finally emailed them the report. A couple of hours later, he emailed the woman at the PMO saying Kevin and Lindsay hadn’t responded, that they were being uncommunicative. Lindsay wasn’t sure whether to laugh or punch something. She couldn’t wait to tell Kevin, but didn’t want to burden him with all this stuff while he was trying to focus on work, so she called her mother instead.

‘That’s a bit off,’ Heather said, and Lindsay was irritated that she didn’t at least raise her voice. ‘What will it mean for your claim?’

‘It doesn’t mean anything, really,’ Lindsay said. ‘But it does confirm what we suspected about him playing games.’

‘At best, he was putting off doing something. Or maybe he forgot,’ Heather said. ‘And he’s covering up his own mistake.’

‘So he’s not a jerk?’ Lindsay said. Why was her mother trying to explain away this guy’s behaviour?

‘No, I’m not saying that,’ Heather said, ‘because clearly he is. But a deceptive game-playing claims manager is different from an incompetent one. You’ll need to decide which one he is, because it will affect how you handle him.’

‘When did you get so devious?’ Lindsay said. She had never thought of her mother as a calculating person. If anything, she was too often willing to believe the best of people.

‘Oh, darling,’ Heather said. ‘Since we were fletchered.’

Lindsay was silent for a moment. ‘It’s not fair that dealing with these people is making us turn into the type of people we’ve never wanted to be.’

‘I think of it this way,’ Heather said. ‘We’re the same people we were, we’ve just had to develop a few more skills to deal with the nasty people of this world.’

‘I suppose.’

‘You don’t sound convinced,’ Heather said. Lindsay heard the concern in her mother’s voice.

‘I don’t think I’ll know until this is all over, and right now, looking at this massive stream of incompetence and deception, I don’t feel like it’s ever going to be over.’

‘I wish I could tell you when it will be finished,’ Heather said. ‘I wish I knew.’

‘I know,’ Lindsay said. ‘Until then, I feel like I’m wading through a sewer.’

Two hours later, she hit gold. It was in the form of instructions to the geotechnical engineering company who had been engaged to carry out an investigation, which was then cancelled. The first set of instructions stated that their foundation was to be completely replaced. It wasn’t a spectacular find, but it backed up the first scope of works Kevin and Lindsay had received. It showed that the repair strategy of lifting the house and replacing its foundation hadn’t been something only briefly considered, as this was a full six months after the scope of works had been written.

The real piece of gold was the instructions Rutherford gave to the geotechnical engineer shortly before the offer of cash settlement had been made in 2013. Because Lindsay and Kevin had asked why the geotechnical investigation had been cancelled, Rutherford had instructed the engineer to complete the investigation, and part of his instructions included a new repair strategy, one Lindsay and Kevin hadn’t seen before. It showed that parts of the foundation should be replaced along the eastern and western sides of the house. But when Rutherford submitted the building consent application to the City Council in 2014, he included diagrams showing that the foundation along the northern end of the house would be replaced. This 2014 strategy ignored several metres of crumbling foundation, including the part that Kevin had pointed out to the tendering builder earlier in the year.

If you combined the two repair strategies, the one submitted to the City Council and the one Rutherford had drawn up in 2013, nearly all the visible damage was covered and over three-quarters of the ring beam would be replaced. But Rutherford hadn’t done that. Instead, he had submitted to the council a sub-standard repair strategy that completely ignored damage he had previously identified. The man was incompetent, and it was provable.

‘What do we do about it?’ Kevin said. Lindsay’s happiness had been evident when Kevin arrived at home, but they agreed to postpone discussion of the files until after the children were in bed. Now, she, Kevin and Alice were gathered around the dining table, examining the files she had printed out during the day.

‘Complain,’ Alice said. She put the two repair strategy diagrams side-by-side. ‘Point out the issues, ask for a new project manager and a review of your file.’

‘What about Bitterman?’ Lindsay said. ‘We could say he’s not acting in our interests, not the way he withholds information from us.’

‘What information?’ Kevin said. ‘There’s only one engineering report and the consent application he withheld from us. That we can prove.’

Lindsay started to object. She didn’t want to deal with Bitterman any more.

‘If he’s effective,’ Alice said, ‘from the insurance company’s point of view, then complaining about him and Rutherford runs the risk of making it seem you’re not happy with any aspect of the claim.’

Kevin was nodding.

Reluctantly, Lindsay nodded her agreement. They were right, better the devil they knew. Lindsay would focus her efforts on drafting a complaint about Rutherford that they would then submit to someone higher up in the insurance company than Bitterman.

Lindsay lay awake that night, her mind racing. They could actually make progress, if they had a different project manager, if they could show Rutherford’s assessment of their house had been substandard. She had hope, but she didn’t want to let that hope grow. It had been nearly four years since their claim was passed over to their insurance company, and after all that time, hope was a dangerous thing.

It had taken a couple of weeks to sift through all the information from the privacy request and assemble the complaint, but Alice thought it had been worth it. It gave Lindsay and Kevin hope of a way forward other than agreeing to what their instincts told them was a substandard repair. Letting the insurance company going ahead with their planned patch job was, Alice could see, inviting disaster. There were too many reports of badly repaired houses and too little acknowledgement of the problem on the part of authorities and insurers to feel comfortable letting the repair go ahead.

Neil and Heather had received their excess bill, which indicated that the value of their repairs had been close to $80,000. That seemed outrageous for what appeared to be a cosmetic cover-up of their structural damage, so they put in an Official Information Request for their scope of works. If they were going to pay the $800 excess, they said in their request, they wanted to know exactly what they were paying for. By the end of August, Neil and Heather should have the information they had asked for.

Earlier in the year, the Ministry responsible for building standards had surveyed fourteen houses at the request of the homeowners. Thirteen of the houses had substandard foundation repairs, and that finding was concerning enough for the Ministry to carry out another survey, of a larger pool of houses. The houses included were those who had repairs carried out without a building consent and where the homeowner hadn’t raised any concerns over the quality of repairs. The point was to get a feel for the overall quality of repairs in Canterbury, and put to rest rumours of widespread shoddy repairs.

A claimants group said the survey was a whitewash. Through the Official Information Act, the group had obtained information on how the houses were selected for the survey. EQC and insurers had put together a list of just over two thousand properties that fit the survey’s criteria. EQC and insurers then chose three hundred of those properties to pass on to the Ministry for consideration. Of the three hundred, the Ministry selected about a hundred to survey. It looked like EQC and insurers had been able to hand pick what properties were surveyed, which could skew the survey results in their favour and, therefore, mask the true extent of repair quality issues.

Alice hoped the survey wasn’t biased, because authorities finally acknowledging that there were issues with the quality of repairs would make her grandparents’ lives easier. And she didn’t like to think about building a future in a city where tens of thousands of houses harboured hidden earthquake damage. The problems would linger for years, if not decades, coming to light only when people sold their houses and prospective owners commissioned a building inspection. Or worse, when there was another big quake and insurers started declining claims on the basis of ‘historic’ damage from the 2010 earthquake sequence. No, repairs had to be done right now, not swept under the carpet and left to be someone else’s problem. Her generation’s problem.

The most troubling aspect of the so-called recovery in the past few months was the efforts being made by EQC to overturn IPENZ’s findings against the EQC engineer who had been found negligent and incompetent at the end of 2014. The engineer was appealing the findings to what was called the Chartered Professional Engineers Council. CPEC, apparently, could overrule IPENZ’s finding, and the EQC’s chief executive had written to the CPEC chairman saying how difficult it would be for EQC if the findings of negligence and incompetence were allowed to stand. CPEC had been asked to ‘correct the problems with the decisions’ and to consider that the findings, if not overturned, had serious consequences for both EQC and insurance companies, which meant money. EQC was, in effect, asking CPEC to transfer the risk away from EQC and insurance companies to homeowners. EQC’s cost-cutting mindset was forcing substandard repairs on the homeowners of Christchurch, and EQC was asking CPEC to let them do it.

Alice was stunned when, at the end of July, IPENZ’s findings of negligence and incompetence against the EQC engineer were overturned. That decision said, in effect, that engineers had no duty of care towards anyone other than their client. An engineer’s client could frame the brief in a way that sidestepped the engineering code of ethics and, in effect, left people like insurance company customers hanging out to dry.

CPEC’s decision could still be appealed, if IPENZ decided to take the issue to the District Court. Hopefully they would, because if they didn’t, it was the engineering equivalent of the medical profession discarding the Hippocratic Oath.

‘What does this mean for us?’ Lindsay asked as Alice tried to explain the implications of the decision. ‘We aren’t with EQC, so it shouldn’t affect us, right?’ Alice could hear the worry in her voice, the hope that was quickly fading. They had talked recently about getting their engineer to review the repair strategy in light of what they had uncovered about the work proposed. Cost was holding them back, and uncertainty about whether it would actually help them.