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- When Luke Hanan, 45, from Tauranga, NZ was caught in a landslide he and his family were terrified
- His three children were caught up with one flung like a ragdoll to the other end of the house.
- The impact of the landslide split Luke’s home literally in two.
- Despite the trauma the wonderful community helped Luke’s family back on their feet.
Here Luke who had his home devastated by a landslide shares his story in his own words
Dipping my brush into the bucket of white paint, I applied a final coat to the living room wall. Taking a step back, I looked around at all our hard work – a whopping two years of house renovations.
‘We’re finally finished!’ I beamed to my partner Teressa, then 34.
I’d purchased the four-bedroom house located at the bottom of a hill in Tauranga, NZ, a few years earlier in 2019.
It needed a lot of work, but we planned to transform it into our dream home for our blended family, including my kids, Natalie, then 14, Morgan, 12, and Mason, nine, and Teressa’s children, Blake, 12, and Bailie, nine.
Aside from painting, we’d also plastered the whole exterior, redone the back deck, and fixed up the bathrooms, among other things.
Now, in January 2023, our home was complete and we were celebrating with a family dinner and a glass of champagne for Teressa and me.
At around 9pm, after tucking Bailie into bed, Teressa and I hit the hay.
As it was school holidays, we let the other kids stay up a bit longer to play video games and watch TV, especially as they’d been stuck inside for days due to relentless rain.
That night the downpour continued, but eventually we drifted off to sleep.
Suddenly, at midnight, I woke with a start.
‘There’s an earthquake,’ Teressa shouted, as the house violently shook.
Panicked and confused, I screamed as the floorboards began to lift and the walls caved in around us.
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Terrified for the kids, we jumped out of bed and lunged towards the mangled door, kicking it open. It was pitch black from a power outage, but as our eyes quickly adjusted, we realised Bailie’s room, across the hall from ours, had eerily disappeared.
In its place was a mountain of mud and tree branches. The external walls of the house had crumbled. Teressa screamed in terror.
‘Has Bailie been crushed into the ground?’
‘Oh my god! Has Bailie been crushed into the ground?’ she panicked, trying to make sense of the frightening situation.
It was like our house had been flipped inside out – corridors and rooms had disappeared or were in complete disarray. Having been torn from their original positions, they were now in other places.
Crawling on our hands and knees through mud and broken glass into the living room where our other kids had been, we realised in horror that the hill behind our house had collapsed, causing a catastrophic landslide which had split our home completely in half.
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Horrifyingly, the children were nowhere to be seen.
Were our babies buried under the mud?
We desperately called out to them, but it was no use over the deafening sounds of the thunderous gushing of mud and debris as it continued to crush our home.
Making our way to the front of the house, we found it – including the kids’ rooms – had been pushed into the street.
The brown slush was now up to our necks.
‘We desperately called out, but it was no use over the sounds of the thunderous gushing of mud.’
‘Kids!’ we shouted over and over. We screamed until we were hoarse.
Have they been buried alive? I wondered, my heart heavy with fear.
Suddenly, we heard Blake crying in a doorway.
Slogging through the mud to him, Teressa soothed Blake as we kept searching for the others.
Soon after, we heard Natalie shouting.
Following the sound of her voice, we finally found her at the back of the house.
Next I made my way to the street where I spotted Mason and Morgan sitting terrified on the bonnet of our neighbour’s Hilux that was now wedged underneath the front of our house.
It turns out the boys had pushed a mattress up to the broken window of their bedroom and climbed out.
I could hear Bailie, who’d been too scared to follow, yelling out. She was still stuck in the crushed house.
When the landslide had obliterated our poor girl’s room, she’d been thrown like a rag doll and ended up at the other end of the house.
Reaching her, I carefully lifted her out through the shattered window, but her right leg was nicked on the jagged glass in the process.
‘Ouch!’ she wailed as blood poured from the cut.
‘The landslide had obliterated our poor girl’s room’
‘I’m so sorry love,’ I soothed.
Thankfully, the others had escaped with just a few bumps and bruises.
The police and paramedics arrived shortly after, and checked over the kids in the back of an ambulance.
‘Thank God you’re all alive!’ Teressa cried.
Mason had a mild concussion from being catapulted off his bed and against the wall during the awful ordeal, but otherwise everyone was declared to be okay.
The next day, after sleeping at Teressa’s parents’ place, we went back home to assess the damage. The property was deemed unsafe to enter, though, so we couldn’t try to salvage anything.
It was tough to see the full extent of the destruction in broad daylight.
In just a matter of minutes, our home and all the hard work we’d poured into it were gone. And our two cats, Puss Puss and Becca, were also missing.
Our next door neighbours’ places were severely damaged too.
We’d been left with nothing but the clothes on our backs.
Moving in with Teressa’s parents, we tried to build our lives back up from the ground.
I went back to work as a builder a few days after, while the kids had a bit more time off school after the holidays finished.
Teressa’s sister Larissa set up a crowdfunding page to help us, with hundreds of generous donors chipping in.
Sadly, no amount of money could erase the traumatic memories. Our children were riddled with anxiety, scared the house and even their school would collapse whenever it rained. The kids had therapy to help them cope.
Two weeks after the landslide, we incredibly found our cats.
Applying for emergency accommodation, we finally found somewhere to live in October 2023, while we waited for our insurance payout. But sadly our claim was denied.
We’d only just taken out the policy and hadn’t served the waiting period.
Thankfully we did receive a payout under the Earthquake Commission Act, which provides government support for insured homeowners affected by a natural disaster.
‘Our children were riddled with anxiety, scared the house and even their school would collapse’
The ordeal took its toll on us all.
The kids missed having their own rooms with all their toys and prized possessions.
And sadly, Teressa and I separated earlier this year.
Now, with my kids, I’m focused on moving forward and making new memories together.
I’m so grateful for all the support from our community to help us get back on our feet.
It’s rare that people make it out alive from a disaster as catastrophic as the one we experienced.
But I’m thankful we all lived to tell the tale.
A landslide is the movement of large amounts of rock, earth, sand, mud or debris down a sloped section of land. Landslides can be caused by a natural disaster like an earthquake or by heavy rain or flooding.
What causes Landslides?
A big downpour can cause the soil on a hillside to be saturated to the point that vegetation can no longer support the soil’s weight against gravity. This top layer of soil can then slip, taking whatever is on the land with it. Landslides do occur in Australia, but are more common in parts of New Zealand due to the country’s mountainous terrain, loose volcanic soil and frequent earthquakes
