Dogs rescued during mad dash

A Dunedin family have talked of rescuing their dogs from their kennel as it was being carried atop a slow-moving landslip headed for the family home.

Maia residents Fiona Cadogan and Chad Ralston live at the foot of a gully below Manapouri St in Burkes Dr.

Early on Friday morning the family heard the rumble — a time which seemed "forever ago now".

They jumped out of bed to investigate, Ms Cadogan said.

"When we came out, the dog kennel and the garage — it was all just creaking and moving that way ... so we got the dogs out as quick as we could, then it just swallowed up the garage, the kennels, all our cars, bar one.

A large slip in Maia forced a local family’s Land Cruiser into their dining room. PHOTOS: STEPHEN JAQUIERY

"So we rescued that car, gathered the kids and went."

"It was the scariest thing ever," she said.

The mad dash by the family involved her daughter grabbing a cat and her son throwing a bag together packed with clean underwear and a soccer ball before they high-tailed it in the family’s surviving vehicle.

The family originally had four vehicles — one was now sitting in the dining room, another was perched on what was once their deck and a third was lying upside down in the mess.

The fourth vehicle survived by "pure luck", Ms Cadogan said.

Maia resident Fiona Cadogan stands in front of the landslip that has made her home uninhabitable.

"We had it parked away from the others cars because we were doing a renovation of the kitchen ... That’s $40,000 spent down the drain."

The slip had carried the garage all the way to their house.

"The slip’s burst through it [and] I don’t know how deep the mud is — where we had a big deck is now just coated with probably 10m of mud."

The family went to stay with Ms Cadogan’s in-laws and had only been given the all-clear to enter the property again on Saturday.

One of the priorities was to find the family’s pet chinchilla, Dora — thankfully, she was "chilling" and not fazed by the wreckage around her, Ms Cadogan said.