A Hunter family lived with the sound of cracking bricks for two years, in a house damaged by a natural disaster, after their insurance company offered them less than five per cent of what they were ultimately entitled to, a Royal Commission has heard.
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The two storey Lochinvar home where Bernie Heald and her husband Bruce lived with their two children – who each have health issues – was damaged beyond repair during the superstorm of April, 2015.
Ms Heald gave evidence to the Financial Services Royal Commission in Melbourne on Thursday, where she outlined her struggle with insurance company Suncorp while living in a house she feared was crumbling around her family.
“We were living in a house that was broken and basically nobody cared, that’s what we felt like,” she said in her evidence on Wednesday.
“At one point I even begged them to move us out because I was concerned for our safety.”
Ms Heald told Fairfax Media Suncorp would not listen to the family’s claim that the house, which has since been demolished, was unsafe to live in.
She described the period after the storm, until a ruling this year that Suncorp had to pay more than 20 times its original offer, as being filled with “frustration, terror and confusion”.
“It was like pulling teeth from the get-go,” she said.
“Our house was in pretty bad shape but they left us living there.
“It was just this constant stream of red tape and all we asked for was what was in our insurance policy, that’s what we wanted.”
Suncorp offered the family a $30,762 cash settlement to repair the damage, but the Financial Ombudsman Service ruled the amount was inadequate.
It ordered the company to pay the Healds enough to demolish the house and rebuild in January this year – almost three years after the storm.
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The Healds, including their 17-year-old son Logan, who has a suppressed immune system after a heart transplant as a baby, and 11-year-old daughter Aleena, who lives with anxiety and depression, stayed in their damaged home until Suncorp agreed to pay for temporary resettlement in January, 2017.
Before that, Ms Heald said, they had nowhere else to go – their extended family lives in Queensland and they couldn’t afford to pay rent on top of a mortgage.
They remain in temporary accommodation.
The superstorm that hit the Hunter in April, 2015, was classified a natural disaster by the NSW government.
“They tried to say we didn’t look after our slab, that we didn’t get as much rain as we did - they tried to say we didn’t look after our house,” said Ms Heald, whose family held a policy with Suncorp for 16 years.
“If you have a wall of water fall on your house it doesn’t matter what your drainage is like.”
After the storm, the cracked concrete slab allowed muddy water to rise up through the floor of the Freeman Drive home during periods of rain and left it susceptible to moving as much as 60mm.
Ms Heald said it was common for bricks in the house to break, cracks to appear in the gyprock and tiles to pop loose.
Fed up with the lack of help from Suncorp, the family paid for an engineer who was not linked with the insurance company to check the house.
He recommended the home be demolished and rebuilt.
“We had a lot of issues particularly when [Aleena] heard bricks breaking in the middle of the night, she was terrified thinking the house was going to fall,” Ms Heald said.
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“All we asked for was what we were entitled to in our insurance policy.
“Obviously because it was a big amount the insurance company didn’t want to pay for it.
“They treat you like a number. It’s like you’re guilty and you have to prove your innocence.
“When this sort of stuff happens you’re vulnerable, you’re worried, you’re scared and they treat you as if you are a criminal.
“They were not there to help us at all and that was the point – we needed them in our lives.”
Suncorp’s insurance CEO Gary Dransfield told the Royal Commission he was “sincerely sorry” for how the company “failed” the Heald family.
Mr Dransfield acknowledged Suncorp’s engineers who assessed the house were incorrect in their findings.
He told the Royal Commission the company had been “insufficiently compassionate to their situation”.
“I think we should have taken Mrs Heald’s concerns very seriously around temporary accommodation, we should have had an engineer go and review the property again for safety and we should have advanced the claim and her matter with considerable haste,” he said.