Residents are concerned what the large sinkhole will do to ageing water infrastructure below.<\/p>\n
The hole emerged on Thursday evening and is about 5m long, 3m wide and over a metre deep in parts.<\/p>\n
Watercare said fixing it could take up to two months.<\/p>\n
A heavy stream of water could be seen flowing through the hole, located in a dip on Hackett St.<\/p>\n
Suction hoses were on Monday working hard to remove water pooling in the large hole in the middle of the road but water continued to gush down into a large gap space beneath the tarmac.<\/p>\n
The section of road was damaged in the Auckland Anniversary floods in January 2023, after which it was covered by a metal plate.<\/p>\n
![\"Sink](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/4JKT2SH_Sink_Hole_St_marys_bay_6_jpg.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
On Monday workers were using suction hoses to remove water pooling in the large hole.<\/p>\n
Nick Monro<\/p>\n
On Thursday, the road appeared to have collapsed, with some residents reporting losing water for several hours.<\/p>\n
Tony Skelton has lived in the area for 53 years.<\/p>\n
“So for three years it’s been lying in a condition which clearly shows that there are some infrastructural issues that could cause serious damage if left unattended,” he said.<\/p>\n
He’s particularly concerned about what the sinkhole and flow of water with a 126-year-old emergency overflow point, or EOP, located beneath it.<\/p>\n
“If there is further damage to the EOP that could undermine our properties, it could cause considerable problems.”<\/p>\n
![\"Sink](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/4JKT2EP_Sink_Hole_St_marys_bay_8_jpg.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Tony Skelton has lived in the area for 53 years.<\/p>\n
Nick Monro<\/p>\n
Of particular concern is what would happen during the next heavy rain event.<\/p>\n
“We are very concerned about it and we have been for years. The infrastructure here is a major concern to this suburb and no-one is listening to us about this.”<\/p>\n
John Hill from the St Mary’s Bay Association said nobody knew the extent of the damage to the infrastructure since the Auckland Anniversary Weekend floods.<\/p>\n
“We are seriously concerned with this old infrastructure. We’ve had collapses in other parts of St Mary’s Bay – it’s 126-years-old – and it all arrives here at this EOP which is way down, it’s seven metres down.<\/p>\n
Hill said the issue demonstrated why the recently-approved Plan Change 120, which would allow for housing intensification in inner-Auckland suburbs, was a bad idea.<\/p>\n
“They’re zoning the whole of St Mary’s Bay for six-storey buildings and they’re planning to put it on old infrastructure,” he said.<\/p>\n
“This is a horrible indication that warns everybody that it can’t be done.”<\/p>\n
![\"Sink](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/4JKT1XR_Sink_Hole_St_marys_bay_9_jpg.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
John Hill from the St Mary’s Bay Association.<\/p>\n
Nick Monro<\/p>\n
Watercare chief operations officer Mark Bourne said it was investigating what caused the section of road to collapse above the pipes.<\/p>\n
Water and wastewater services would remain online while the repair work was carried out .<\/p>\n
Hackett St would be closed at the site of the hole, however, residents would still be able to access their properties.<\/p>\n
He said these were significant infrastructure repairs and work was expected to take around two months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Matthew Theunissen reports from St Mary’s Bay sinkhole Morning Report The sinkhole that appeared on a street in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546797,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-546796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}