A Canterbury woman is still waiting on an insurance settlement almost seven years after her family home was damaged in the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake.
Next month it will be seven years since the earthquake that claimed 185 lives, saw parts of the city red-zoned, and damaged or destroyed thousands of homes.
Nikki Ross' family home has no water or sewerage connections, and the family are still paying a mortgage and rates on a house that is unliveable.
Their garden however had flourished and it was now growing where the floor once was in the dining room.
"There's no floors so it's just a muck-filled swamp underneath the house that's growing a variety of different plants ... inside the property."
Ms Ross, who was diagnosed with melanoma during that period, told Checkpoint with John Campbell that most of the damage to their Woolston home occurred in the February quake but heavy liquefaction in June 2011 added serious land subsidence to the extensive structural damage.
"Seven years down the track, we are at the end of another failed repair.
"The house was initially repaired in 2013 only to find out it was a faulty repair ... It took until May 2016 for them to commence the rerepair. The house has now been left abandoned - no floors, no internal walls - since August 2016."
EQC had now conceded that it had made a mistake at the beginning, she said, and the house should have been a rebuild.
Trish Keith from EQC said it was hoping to offer the family a settlement in the next three weeks.
"I apologise unreservedly to Nikki and to her boy and it's just so unfortunate that we are so far down this track."
