Cyclone Gabrielle has ripped through Hawke's Bay, destroying livelihoods and costing lives. Photo / Paul Taylor
OPINION: February 15, one of the grimmer days that Hawke’s Bay has endured, ended with a piece of news to rejoice about.
Napier is connected to Hastings.
State Highway 51 is open. It’s a road that traverses three waterways - the Tutaekuri, Ngaruroro and Clive Rivers - in quick succession.
All of them flooded in a bad way on Tuesday, but all three bridges held up and it was decided they could open to essential traffic at 8pm.
To the engineers who designed those bridges, and to the people who built them and checked them - Napier thanks you.
Wednesday was the day we learned 9000 people in Hawke’s Bay had been displaced. Iroquois buzzed non-stop above us and news alerts kept piling up (three dead in Hawke’s Bay now). We needed something.
Follow live updates of Cyclone Gabrielle here
Those who are deemed “essential” will now be allowed out and in of Napier, presumably just like the “essential workers” of the Covid lockdown days. Aren’t we all excited to hear that terminology again?
I hope people are patient because Napier is in crisis. The swampy island that became a city, keeps reverting back to its swampy island days. The morning started with yet more evacuations in Maraenui. Not quite the 2020 floods, but supremely frustrating.
There’s no other word than crisis to describe where we’re at after two days, because the needs of a population of 60,000 are almost entirely reliant on the whirring of generators and helicopters.
Most home freezers and fridges of stocked-up supplies are now slowly melting, fermenting, rotting. If predictions of continued power cuts are correct, that will continue to be a problem.
Huge queues formed at supermarkets to get food on Wednesday.
I feel for those who aren’t essential, who still can’t leave Napier.
But the promise of a world that isn’t dark, damp and isolating is closer now.
You would expect State Highway 2 - the Hawke’s Bay Expressway - to open next. It may take a bit of time.
Other road and rail connections out of Napier could take longer again.
The highway to Wairoa will essentially need to be rebuilt and it will need massive political willpower to achieve it.
The Esk River’s unimaginable torrent has damaged the already shaky foundations of the bridge that is the northern lifeline out of Hawke’s Bay.
As an aside, photos from the air also appeared to show pulp mill Pan Pac surrounded by floodwaters, a potential hammer blow for Hawke’s Bay’s economy.
We’re already reeling from the loss of millions of apples. Cyclone Gabrielle simply stripped the trees and carried off the fruit in her floodwaters. This season’s crucial crop looks doomed.
Further north on the Napier-Wairoa Rd, the infamous Devil’s Elbow is now a brown snake of mud - one truck surrounded by it.
The highway down below Putorino will likely be left to return to nature - the town was already scheduled to be bypassed anyway.
Then there’s the rail line. Cyclone Gabrielle might’ve put the final nail in the coffin of that too.
State Highway 5′s an odd one to predict an opening time for.
Waka Kotahi NZTA told a local truckie that there are 50 slips on one section alone. But the fact they were able to count to 50 sounds positive to me. They can’t be that big.
Then again, the photos out of Esk Valley show how much work will be needed on that part of the highway - silt, mud, driftwood and debris for miles.
On Wednesday we wake to find ourselves still living through this tragedy, one we can’t easily drive away from.
But Lily, 12, has the right attitude. Amid a wave of rescue videos and Civil Defence alerts, she sent me a poem:
Dirty water rushing past
Devastation growing fast
Trees fallen, branches torn
Storm water floods the lawn
As the water pools around my feet
The cyclone admits its defeat
For we will never give up
With our eyes forward and our chins up.
- Lily Pywell
Napier’s water was once sourced via wells at the White Swan Brewery and Botanical Gardens.