Thinking outside the square in cyclone’s wake

By Gerald Rillstone.

With Cyclone Gabrielle hitting businesses like Napier forestry employer Pan Pac hard, Chris Greaney, owner of City Collision Repairs, Napier, sees a bleak outlook for the coming year.

But he’s already contemplating what he needs to do to keep the doors open if his worst fears come to fruition, and says he’s looking to take on work he normally wouldn’t.

“Our focus is keeping everybody’s jobs and if we have to do different work then that’s what we’ll do.

“It’s important at times like this to maintain insurance company relationships and time to start thinking outside the square in terms of what work we do to stay afloat.”

When Radiator featured Chris in October last year, he had invested heavily in his business specialising in repairing Teslas. Now he fears for the future of not only his business, but also others in the motor industry, with a huge chunk of the customer base out of work.

“It has been devastating and I think it will have a big flowon effect for businesses in the Hawke’s Bay,” Chris says. “There will be thousands of cars taken off the road and writtenoff.”

When Radiator visited, Chris had already lost about a week of business with power and communication outages, but he says at least it’s not as bad as the flood two years ago when pumps put in place to protect the business precinct from flooding failed.

“They couldn’t get rid of the water, and we had $300,000 in claims; it was pretty traumatic.”

Chris says he feared it was happening again but never imagined the wider affect the community faces this time round.

This time both cities fared quite well but the area in between them is where it has been hit the hardest.

“We had already experienced a small slowdown in business beforehand and I think inflation is getting to our customers as well, and now with industries like Pan Pac, which has been wiped out, and others that all spend money on all of us businesses, going forward it’s going to be interesting.”

Chris counts himself lucky this time around too: he was evacuated from his home, but it didn’t get flooded.

“Two years ago, our house got flooded and we lost quite a lot of stuff out of the garage, tools and cars, but we had since moved and I thought, ‘No not again, I can’t go through it again’.”

And it was close this time.

“We got out of the house and then were told we could go back, but two hours later they banged on the door again to say the riverbanks had burst and we had to get out, but luckily this time I didn’t lose any cars or anything,” he says. “We are a lot luckier than a lot of other people in the area.”