Progress with remaining repairs

Eight weeks after the establishment of a new Central hub repair teams are making good progress planning the completion of remaining repairs in the Canterbury Home Repair Programme.

The Head of Fletcher Earthquake Recovery, Walt Friedel, says the change in early May from six hubs to a new Central hub with staff changes at the same time led to some short-term disruption in communication with homeowners but a big effort by teams to provide better customer service is making its mark. “Contractors are currently completing the equivalent of one repair every hour of the working week which shows this is still a project on a massive scale. Nearly 98% of full repairs are either complete or underway."

Around 300 properties remain to be scoped and a new process has recently been introduced to speed progress with this. EQR no longer attends every scope meeting and these are organised for EQC, the contractor and homeowner to attend. This means homeowners can discuss their claim entitlements and repair strategies directly with EQC at each scope.

Once homeowners have confirmed they wish to continue with a managed repair Fletcher EQR’s Central hub team takes over to set up a pre-start meeting with a Contract Supervisor, the homeowner and the contractor assigned to the repair.

To improve communication a pack of documents is now being sent out to homeowners ahead of the repair pre-start meeting. This includes the approved Scope of Works and a copy of any technical report on the repair solutions if engineering input had been required.

Repair Solutions team

Another initiative has been the establishment of a joint Fletcher EQR/EQC Repair Solutions team. The team’s priority is to assist around 700 homeowners who have repairs on hold for a range of reasons. “In the past few weeks we’ve made contact with several hundred of these customers and made progress with many,” Mr Friedel said. “The objective of this new team is to work with the homeowner to clarify the issues that have been delaying the repair and identify the best outcome for them.”

An updated version of the Homeowner Guide to the repair programme is available to read or download here.
There’s more detail on progress with substantive repairs here or on EQC’s website.
Read more about some of the team who work for Fletcher EQR here

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