“Catastrophic” impact for motorbike megastore

MEGA MOTORCYCLE STORE CYCLESPOT, THE MECCA FOR KIWI BIKERS, WAS HIT HARD DURING THE AUCK-

Mega motorcycle store Cyclespot, the Mecca for Kiwi bikers, was hit hard during the Auckland anniversary weekend flooding, with over 400 motorcycles drowned and over a million dollars in stock ruined.

Now the business faces a long road to recovery.

There was nothing owner and MTA director, Grant Woolford could have done to stop the torrent of water engulfing the business on Wairau Road on the North Shore.

Now he faces months of insurance battles and stress to get the business he is immensely proud of up and running again.

“We have lost 400 motorcycles and just over a million dollars in accessories, and there was every brand of motorcycle from exotic stuff that can’t be replaced to more common models. It is catastrophic,” Grant says.

“In reality there was nothing we could do at any time to stop the water coming in.”

The store opened in 2021 and was years in the making, employing around 40 staff.

Cyclespot is New Zealand’s largest store catering to the biker community. It boasted 2,000 square metres of floor space fully stocked with 10 of the world’s leading motorcycle brands, and all the accoutrements that go with them, including a café for customers.

But that all changed when the rain pelted down late on the Friday afternoon, and there was nothing that could have been done once Wairau Stream, at the rear of the property, began to rage.

“When we finished on Friday night at 5 o’clock, I checked out the back and we could see the stream coming up, but there was nothing to be worried about,” Grant says.

“When I left at 5.45 it was definitely higher than I had ever seen it before and it didn’t look like it was calming down; it was about to ramp up.”

But not for a moment did he think it was going to get as bad as it did. Grant headed home for dinner with his wife Melissa, but along the way there were a few omens this weather event was shaping up to be like no other, it was almost pre-apocalyptic.

“As I drove home, I could see things that I had never seen before in 25 years of living on the North Shore, places were flooding that I had never seen flood before, things were looking a bit wrong.

“When I got home, I was having dinner and I said to Melissa ‘I think we should go back and see how work is’,” he says. They headed back out in torrential rain and found the whole place was already inundated with over a metre of water.

Clean up and recovery

Grant’s business survival instinct kicked in the next morning before the flooding was over, gearing up for the clean-up, making calls and planning for a reopening.

“I was on the phone at 6.45am on Saturday morning to my insurer and he was on the phone to his head assessor and by Wednesday we had full assessment teams in the building going through it all.

“Their urgency and that fact that they were there and getting things sorted is amazing, but we’ll see what happens when they have to write the cheques out, that’s the critical part.”

There was some good news too. The mezzanine floor of the business came through unscathed which was a relief, Grant says, as all the administration is housed up there.

But five days into the clean-up, Auckland Council had his building, along with a number of others in the valley, ‘yellow stickered’ as it was perceived to be contaminated from pollutants in the water.

“The council waltzed in and quite happily put a yellow sticker on our building because they think we have contamination in the building along with everyone else around us,” Grant says.

“I hoped to open in a month but now I don’t have an understanding of when we will be open again.

“What it means is we cannot have public in the building until the council deem it safe, so all floor coverings need to be removed and relaid and all walls need to be stripped of Gib, sanitised and regibbed.

“We are talking about carpeting 2,000 square metres and not only that, having to remove 2,000 square metres of carpet and vinyl and preparing the floor to redo it.”

At a rough estimate that could take six months, he says.

“In reality there was nothing we could do at any time to stop the water coming in.”