Residents of a central Auckland apartment block are on tenterhooks as the clock ticks down to a Monday deadline to evacuate the building.
Auckland Council says the 199-apartment block on Albert St is too dangerous to live in, and everyone will be made to leave the building unless remediation work is done.
Hundreds of tradies are working round the clock to get the City Gardens Apartments to meet fire safety standards after Auckland Council issued a Dangerous Building Notice.
The notice was issued last Friday, and now the Monday afternoon deadline is looming.
"Nobody was expecting it," one woman admitted to Newshub.
Mike Fenwick has rented his apartment for four years.
"I have a few things ready to go, and I have somewhere to go as a plan B."
Some of the residents were totally unaware of the situation, and in some cases their landlords simply hadn't passed on the information.
Others were worried that they only had a few hours to get their bags packed and ready to go.
While in some cases, residents were new migrants with nowhere else to go.
There have been issues with the apartment block for years but matters came to a head last month when Fire and Emergency NZ (FENZ) inspectors found significant defects with the fire safety systems within the building.
The alarm also failed to alert FENZ when a sprinkler was activated - all of which prompted the dangerous building notice.
"The body corporate is doing everything it can to make sure that those issues are addressed properly," body corporate barrister Tim Rainey said.
"We fully expect that by Friday we will have most of those issues fully addressed to the council's satisfaction and the notice will be withdrawn. "
Auckland Council inspectors continue to play hardball so the evacuation will go ahead.
"There's a list of, I don't know, probably eight or ten things I think off the top of my head on that list that we're expecting to be done," Auckland Council Building Consents Manager Ian McCormack said.
"Ninety percent done, 10 percent to go. Good luck."
When asked if Rainey would feel safe living in the building, he responded: "I would feel safe living in this building once the additional things that are being done, particularly today and hopefully tomorrow, have been resolved."
Inspectors will go in again tomorrow morning, to assess the building.
However, the body corporate still has one ace up its sleeve.
Just in case, it's also applied to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) to suspend the evacuation notice until a determination can be made.
That would postpone the date, however, they're hoping it doesn't come to that.
