A Wellington couple is in negative equity after a $300,000 bill to fix two slips on their property in the wake of the capital’s wettest winter.

Vogeltown resident Tim Foote told the city council’s Environment and Infrastructure Committee the situation has made it less safe for their toddler to play outside.

The first of two slips fell at the back of their property in February last year when Cyclone Dovi hit, Foote said.

“It came down behind the house like a freight train. I was home and it was quite shocking.”

The slip was around an 8m high bank behind the house that was cut out several decades ago, Foote said.

The second slip fell at the front of the property during intense rain in June last year. Two months later the couple engaged engineers who began work but then the hill started to crack and their deck started moving.

The total repair bill is almost $300,000 of which EQC has paid $98,000, Foote said.

“So there’s a $200,0000 gap for us to cover. We’ve hit the ceiling of what the bank will loan us, our parents have thankfully stepped in to help us bridge the gap, but we’re well into negative equity now.”

One of the slips slid on to city council land and because the couple did not have an easement on the footpath, they potentially missed out on an extra $60,000 from EQC.

“It was a pretty hard year last year, personally I can speak to feeling really anxious,” Foote said.

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Last year the council responded to 861 slip sites, including this one in Karori. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Last year’s slips cost Wellington City Council a record amount of money to clear, $1.8m, and council callouts for slips were three times more than the previous year.

The slips were driven by wet weather and modified slopes, which have been cut and filled to build roads and homes through Wellington’s hilly topography.

Last year 26 households were displaced due to slips and 12 roads were closed. Four properties remain unoccupied due to dangerous building notices being issued.

The city council is faced with the prospect of future slips at a greater frequency and scale as the impact of climate change starts to bite.

A climate change report released last year showed rainfall in Wellington could increase by up to 40 per cent during the most extreme bursts of weather, leading to more severe flash flooding and slips.

Environment and Infrastructure Committee chairwoman councillor Tamatha Paul said resilience to severe weather events was at the top of the council’s priority list.

“Climate adaptation is just as important as climate mitigation, so we need to keep doing important projects like decarbonising our transport system so that the weather doesn’t get worse. It’s not too late to give up.”

Councillor Iona Pannett said bad planning decisions made in the past have resulted in some houses almost falling off cliffs.

She encouraged people to get an engineer to assess any property they were considering buying if they could afford it.

Contractors used a digger to clear a slip blocking Main Road in Tawa last year. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Councillor Ben McNulty said while Wellington got off comparably lightly in relation to the devastation caused by the likes of Cyclone Gabrielle further north, the capital could not be complacent in its efforts to fight climate change.

“Nature is only just getting started.”

On average the council is forecast to spend $3.5m annually to build new retaining walls over the next few years, but the recent slips have thrown a spanner in the works.

“To address the major slip sites as quickly as possible, there needs to be an uplift in budgets, resources, and the ability to procure quickly,” council officials reported.

The council would effectively have to double its spending on retaining walls over two years to get all the work done.

However, council officials warned that even if this funding was approved, it would be an ambitious programme of work with the current squeeze on construction resources.

Officials will now undertake a review of available budgets for resilience in time for the next long-term plan.