Wellington City Council is dealing with a large number of slips as the city crumbles following the wettest July on record.
One large slip on The Terrace triggered the evacuation of twelve homes on Monday night and two are still deemed unsafe.
A concrete retaining wall was no match for 50 cubic metres of moving earth. Evacuated resident Mudit Mohan lives right next door.
"There was a long bang noise that I heard and my wife was coming back from the office at that time. We thought it was a crash or car accident."
Mohan's home was one of 12 evacuated on Monday night.
"I'm wearing the same clothes since yesterday morning, so it's not a good feeling."
Wellington's had 400 slips so far this year, ranging from large slices of hillside falling away to smaller crumbling slips.
But Wellington City Council chief infrastructure officer Siobhan Procter said it isn't "a worse year by any means".
"There's pretty consistently around about 1100 a year."
But around half of this year's slips have come down in just the past four weeks, many during Wellington's wettest July on record - 294 millimetres of rain fell last month.
"Our station in Kelburn did have its wettest July on record, and that record goes back almost 100 years," said MetService meteorologist Lewis Ferris.
The council's confident its infrastructure can cope including its retaining walls which are regularly checked.
It's investigating why The Terrace concrete wall was wiped out by yesterday's slip. Procter couldn't tell Newshub when it was last inspected.
Geotechnical engineers have given the green light for The Terrace to be cleared tomorrow and the tree posing a risk to most of the homes is no longer a threat, so 10 households have returned home.
But the two homes sitting closest to the landslide are still at risk.
