Not getting the action he needed from his local council, our client took matters into his own hands with the Palert Plus and got the win he and his neighbours deserved.
Read his story below ...
During the Covid lockdown of September 2021, our client was spending more time at home. It wasn’t long before he and his wife noticed the volume of large vehicles on his road seemed to have dramatically increased. Due to this increase in large vehicles, he noticed the house shook reasonably dramatically as the they came thundering down down the road. He sent a request to this local Council and only received an automated “expect a response in 5-10 working days” message.
With no contact from Council about the matter, our client had a chat to a neighbour, who said that he also had noticed his house shaking and that a couple of tiles on his roof had cracked, resulting in water ingress.
They deducted that the shaking was all since Vector had to cut across the road for some gas works. After discussing the matter with more neighbours they all realised that we were all sustaining damage and disturbance from the poorly patched road.
Eventually our client and a neighbour met the contractor on-site, after talking to him about it he said he would arrange to bring some large trucks up and down the road to test it. Not exactly “scientific”, but they thought it was better than nothing. As per their previous Council experience, they never heard from the contractor again.
The next step was to contact Auckland based company Jenlogix, who supply Seismometers and Vibration monitoring solutions, and they were able to provide a cost effective short term monitoring solution.
At the same time they asked neighbours to monitor for shaking and manually record the time. They found everyone’s data coincided when shaking was felt. They were also able to match the time period for shaking, and sure enough – the Palert Plus showed severe vibrations around the same time (allowing for variations in everyone’s measurement of timeframes).
One of the neighbours was contracting to Auckland Council so he started rattling cages and provided firm proof that there was indeed corroborating shaking and vibrations recorded and eventually Council believed them.
The road was finally reinstated as it should have been in the first instance, and the shaking and vibrations reduced.
Without a doubt, the Palert Plus provided absolute proof they would not have achieved a positive outcome had they not been able to provide “hard and fast” data to them. Prior to the Palert Plus, it was simply subjective feelings. Afterwards, it was objective data.