PHOTOS SUPPLIED
When several houses flooded near Alaina King’s Te Kūiti home last Sunday, the DD Cleaning co-owner posted on Facebook offering to help out for free.
Several residents took her up on the offer.
Alaina dried out three homes with her commercial wet and dry extractor. “I just got my extractor out; I cleaned some of their carpets up. Just got the water out, really.”
All homes had previously been affected by flooding above carpet level. “By the time I got there, the water had receded. And [residents] had already started the cleaning process. The floors were just really wet.”
The residents she spoke to seemed “in a good place,” she said. “They’re just going to get on with it and get things done.”
Alaina was worried some people might have been uninsured, especially renters.
“I’ve been in a place where this has happened before. I knew there’d be people who didn’t have insurance,” she said, speaking of the 1987 Edgecumbe earthquake.
“I was in Whakatāne when the earthquake had happened … my grandmother was one whose house got really badly damaged. She did have insurance to cover the damage, but it was her neighbours around that didn’t. Some of them had had to leave their homes and never returned.”
If people had to clean up flooded homes in the future, her suggestion was to dispose of soft furnishings in many cases. Hard furniture could sometimes be salvaged.
Dr Lucy Telfar Barnard, senior research fellow at Otago’s He Kāinga Oranga Housing and Health Research Programme, said floodwater was often contaminated with sewage.
She said “extensive clean-up” was required; anything absorbent “may have to be replaced.”
“That’s because it’s not just about the surface contaminants, but also what’s sitting underneath – and the smell that will not go away unless you do that,” she said.
Mould was a concern in flood-affected homes, especially for those with respiratory conditions.
The homes Alaina cleaned out were not in a location affected by river flooding and sewage contamination; thus, there were efforts to recover carpeting.
