Four men try to refloat their boat in the Ahuriri lagoon after the 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake emptied most of its water. Credit / Keith Winks
Four men try to refloat their boat in the Ahuriri lagoon after the 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake emptied most of its water. Credit / Keith Winks
George Nicholls couldn’t believe what he was seeing when on February 3, 1931, he flew towards Hastings.
Onboard were two doctors from Gisborne to help with casualties after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake.
Nicolls noticed “the floor of the inner lagoon had risen, being now practically dry”.
He was referring toTe Whanganui-a-Orotū (Napier’s Ahuriri inner lagoon), once a large sheet of water – which from a distance, once made Mataruahou (Bluff Hill) look like it was an island.
Such was the force of water emptying out of Te Whanganui-a-Orotū, the sloop HMS Veronica, which had not long ago tied up in the Ahuriri harbour, was only saved from rolling on her side by flax ropes connected to the wharf, after all the wire mooring lines had broken.
The photo, where men are shown painstakingly digging a channel to salvage their boat in Te Whanganui-a-Orotū, was taken by Stanley Bishop of Palmerston North, who was an engineer for automatic telephone exchanges. He travelled to Hawke’s Bay on a motorbike after the earthquake to assist in restoring the exchanges.
With others, Stanley erected a temporary exchange in Hastings, planning for 600 connections. However, in the weeks following the earthquake, only 287 connections were made, and those only for business and professional subscribers. A new phone directory – consisting of a four-page leaflet – was issued in March 1931.
Stanley Bishop was sent from Palmerston North to restore automatic telephone exchanges after the 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake. He took many photos in the area, and is seen here on the Embankment Road, Napier. Credit / Keith Winks
While the telephone exchanges could be restored, not so Te Whanganui-a-Orotū's lagoon, and the home of many pleasure craft, such as Pataki yachts and the vessel shown, would be lost forever.
Not only were boats stranded, but fish were trapped in large pools of seawater that remained. These had to be collected as the smell from rotting fish soon became unbearable in Napier.
When the Tutaekuri River was diverted from the former Ahuriri lagoon in 1934, plans were made by the Napier Harbour Board to drain some of the remaining sections of seawater, which were 30cm to 38cm deep.
A channel of about 1.25km in length and 250m wide was dug, which created a gravity drain for the water to escape. Parallel drains were dug to the main channel so that rainwater could carry away the salt content in the soil - the reclaimed land was to be a settlement area for small farms.
Onekawa, which now stands on the southern reaches of the former lagoon, can be translated in Māori as “salty soil”.
One group desperate for land was the recently formed Napier Aero Club, and they eagerly developed an aerodrome in the now Pandora area of Napier. This was known as the Embankment Aerodrome, as it was on the seaward side of the Embankment Road.
When aircraft began to use it as an emergency landing ground another part of the former lagoon, named “Beacons”, gained favour for development as the principal aerodrome for commercial aircraft.
A large amount of money had been spent on the Embankment Aerodrome to ensure drainage of the area, so it was intended to keep this open for small private aircraft.
During World War II, the Embankment Aerodrome was covered in obstacles, so it could not be used by enemy aircraft. It never reopened after the war, leading to the continued development of what is now the Hawke’s Bay Airport.
