Bill Mackay

In terms of technology at the time, yes, because mainly you're protected by the hill of Albert Park.

And it's not like one gigantic cavern.

It's a bunch of tunnels linking each other.

Oh, I don't know.

But, you know, thousands, you know, and mainly catering.

There were a few schools in the central city, but mainly catering to workers because no one was living in the city at the time.

Yeah.

Apart from a few caretakers at the tops of buildings.

So in the central area of Auckland, there's two things that stop you really doing basements like we'd see in buildings overseas.

One is the volcanic rock, which can be quite hard to excavate.

And the other is, as we get closer down to the waterfront, the very high water table there, especially at a high tide or a spring tide.

We've just gone beyond 4th Street towards the harbour and we're basically on reclaimed land and it's pretty flat so at a high tide the water table is quite high here.

So basically it's unusual to do a basement because you have great problems keeping it waterproof.

It's not so... Well, we're all at risk of flooding where it rains these days.

Oh, they're at higher risk of flooding.

It's more the water table.

So the high tide is not just over there.

It infiltrates all this reclaimed land here.

So it's more kind of like the dampness in the soil and all of that kind of thing rather than the rain from above.

And we tended to, we tended as a country just generally not to go in for basements, mainly because we've mostly built with timber.