A sinkhole big enough to swallow a car has opened on a central Auckland street that has been covered by a steel plate since the January 2023 floods, and Watercare says the repair will take about two months.
The hole appeared on Hackett Street in St Marys Bay about 5.30pm on Thursday 23 July. It is roughly five metres long, three metres wide and more than a metre deep in places, with water visible running through the cavity beneath the road surface. The street has been closed to through traffic since it opened, with drivers detouring via Shelly Beach Road. Residents can still reach their properties.
A water pipe broke on Thursday night as the ground gave way, cutting the supply to some homes for several hours before it was restored the same evening. Contractors were on site working on the collapse by Monday afternoon.
Watercare chief operations officer Mark Bourne said the utility was carrying out reactive water and wastewater work on Hackett Street, where an existing area of collapsed road had deteriorated above its pipes. He described the repairs as significant and said the work was expected to take around two months, RNZ reported.
For the people who live on the street, the collapse was not a surprise. Tony Skelton, who has lived in St Marys Bay for more than 50 years, told 1News the hole was large enough that “it could take a car”. He said the overflow point had been damaged in the January 2023 floods and only partly repaired.
“Watercare has only had a cursory look at it, put a steel plate over it, and it’s been like that for three years,” Skelton said. “Now it has collapsed.”
Skelton told RNZ the pipes under the street were very old. “All the infrastructure here is 126 year-old clay pipes,” he said. His worry is what a second failure would do to the houses on either side of the road, which sits on a steep slope running down towards the harbour.
“If there is further damage, that could undermine our properties and could cause considerable problems,” he said. “The next heavy rain event, we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
That last point matters, because the country is only halfway through winter. The Auckland Anniversary weekend floods of 27 January 2023 dropped more than a quarter of the city’s annual rainfall in a single day, killed four people and left a long tail of damaged roads, slips and broken pipes that councils and utilities are still working through three and a half years later. Hackett Street was one of the places that got a temporary fix rather than a permanent one.
Auckland has form for this. In September 2023 a sinkhole 13 metres deep opened on St Georges Bay Road in Parnell after a sewer collapsed. A failure analysis by consultancy WSP, released in March 2024, found the heavy rainfall of early 2023 had weakened the sewer line, but that it had been combined with 110 years of general deterioration and crumbling blockwork. The report also found that Watercare’s CCTV inspections, which included laser scanning and sonar, had not given a clear enough view of the pipeline’s defects to catch the problem in advance.
The common thread in both cases is age. Auckland’s local water network runs to more than 8,800 kilometres of pipes. Watercare says most of it is in good condition, but around three per cent of water pipes are rated poor and need replacing. Three per cent does not sound like much until you convert it into distance, at which point it becomes a couple of hundred kilometres of pipe that is at or past the end of its working life, much of it under the oldest and most densely built parts of the city.
Watercare is spending to catch up. In September 2025 it announced a record $500 million renewals programme covering the following 18 months, a 44 per cent lift on the $347 million it spent in the equivalent period to June 2025. Chief executive Jamie Sinclair said at the time that the ageing network made the investment crucial to keep services reliable and to cut the number of leaks and overflows.
The bigger number is $13.8 billion over the next decade, roughly $3.8 million a day, split about evenly between expanding the network for a growing city and renewing what is already in the ground. Aucklanders are paying for it directly. Water and wastewater prices rose 7.2 per cent from 1 July, adding about $2 a week to the average household bill, which we covered when the increase was confirmed.
Watercare chief financial officer Angela Neeson made the case for that spending in June, when the prices were confirmed. “Water and wastewater services are critical to how Auckland functions,” she said. “While much of this infrastructure is underground and largely unseen, the outcomes are highly visible.”
Hackett Street is that sentence made literal. Something underground gave way, and the outcome is a five metre crater, a closed road and two months of works in a street where residents have been looking at a steel plate since the summer of 2023. If Skelton’s figure is right, the pipework beneath it was laid when Richard Seddon was premier.
The practical question for the neighbourhood is whether the repair now under way is a full rebuild of the failed section or another patch. Watercare has described the work as significant, which suggests the former, and a two month timeline is not a quick fix. Whether the rest of the 126 year old pipework under St Marys Bay gets the same treatment before the next big rain event is the part nobody has answered yet.
Have you had a road, pipe or slip near you that has been sitting under a temporary fix since the 2023 floods? Tell us where in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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