The aftermath of flooding in the Esk Valley in April 1938, when up to 3m of silt covered the area.
Photo / Hawke's Bay Museums Trust
The aftermath of flooding in the Esk Valley in April 1938, when up to 3m of silt covered the area.
Photo / Hawke's Bay Museums Trust
History can repeat itself — and not just once, twice or even three times.
Esk Valley has seen flooding devastate homes, roading and livelihoods many times spanning over 100 years and probably even longer.
Authorities advised some low-lying locations to evacuate ahead of Cyclone Gabrielle last week, but many residents had little warning they would be facing the worst devastation yet.
Historian and Hastings district councillor Michael Fowler is familiar with the history of flooding in the Esk Valley.
He believes people may have lost sight of that history by the time Cyclone Gabrielle was approaching.
“The last big flood happened in 1938 and generations tend to lose sight of history,” Fowler said.
Fowler published an article in Hawke’s Bay Today in 2018 after flash flooding had hit Esk Valley.
Hawke’s Bay Today reported in 2018 that up to 329mm of rain fell in 24 hours and about 80 homes, mostly in Esk Valley and Rissington, were damaged and rail lines were washed out, while some roads required weeks-long repair work.
Fowler’s reflection upon the region-wide impacts of the 1938 flooding in the 2018 article was terrifyingly prescient when viewed through the lens of what the region has experienced in the past week.
He wrote that 400-510mm of rain fell in the area and homes were embedded in about 3m of silt.
Napier became isolated as the Waitangi Bridge over the Tutaekuri River sank in the middle and 54 bridges in Hawke’s Bay had to be replaced.
Livestock carcasses washed up on the beaches in the following days.
The number of deaths, if any, in the 1938 flooding could not be determined with either Michael Fowler’s research or the sources referenced in NIWA’s Historic Weather Events Catalogue.
A house in Shaw Rd, Esk Valley, is covered in silt after Cyclone Gabrielle.
Photo / Warren Buckland
Even earlier than 1938 was the, arguably even more severe, region-wide flooding in 1897, when the Auckland Star reported that the low-lying lands near Napier were left under water after heavy rains.
The Esk and Mohaka rivers overflowed, bringing down countless livestock and debris, and every bridge along the road from Pētane (now Bayview) to Taupō had collapsed.
Niwa’s Historic Weather Events Catalogue says 292mm of rain fell in two and a half hours and there were possibly up to 15 casualties in Hawke’s Bay, with 533mm over 30 hours reported in the higher reaches of Tukituki, Ngaruroro and Tutaekuri rivers.
The total damage was estimated at £150,000, or $34,309,472 in today’s money.
Cyclone Bola had an effect on the area too, with Niwa recording that 30,000ha of land from Esk River to Kotemaori was very severely affected by erosion and sedimentation in the aftermath, while 25 houses and 10 fruit-pickers were evacuated.
Based on the photos and information he had seen from Esk Valley after Cyclone Gabrielle, Fowler said this flooding was worse than in 1938.
A Hastings District Council spokesperson said as of Friday morning, 78 homes had been red-stickered and 643 yellow-stickered due to Cyclone Gabrielle.
Of those red and yellow-stickered homes so far, 23 red and 53 yellow were in Eskdale and areas of Bay View alone.
In an interview on Q+A with Jack Tame, Finance Minister Grant Robertson said Cyclone Gabrielle would have a “multibillion-dollar price tag”, comparable to the Christchurch earthquake.
Waka Kotahi has estimated the damage to roads alone across the country will cost $1 billion.
Fowler said factors that could have affected the scale or contributed to the flooding in Esk Valley include deforestation leaving less protection from flooding, and climate change.
Fowler said it would be pointless to build in the same locations the same way only for floods to devastate it again, and it may get hard or impossible to insure buildings in places like Esk Valley.
“I can’t speak on behalf of the council, but individually I think there will need to be some hard decisions on whether to build back in places that historically, even before the effects of climate change, flooding had impacted lives, both property and loss of life,” he said.
Michael Fowler says that based on the photos and information he had seen from Esk Valley after Cyclone Gabrielle, this flooding was worse than in 1938. Photo / Warren Buckland.
Eskdale resident Billy MacDonald told RNZ by the time an alert came through, the valley was already flooded.
Katrina and John Harris were in bed when one of their sons alerted them about midnight to rising water on their Esk Valley property.
The Harris family told the Herald they were trapped for hours as raging floodwaters rushed through their home.
The aftermath of flooding in the Esk Valley in April 1938. Photo / Hawke's Bay Museums Trust
Hawke’s Bay Regional Council interim chief executive Pieri Munro said in an earlier statement that he understood the community’s frustrations and that they wanted answers about what had occurred, particularly in Esk Valley.
Munro said HBRC was focused on rebuilding vital flood protection infrastructure, restoring networks, and working with the emergency response co-ordinated by Hawke’s Bay Civil Defence Emergency Management.
“We notified people in the lower reaches of the valley through phone, and many of them self-evacuated as a result,” Munro said.
“At the time, we thought this was a reasonable decision based on the data that we had.”
Munro said there will be a time to review decisions made before and after the initial states of emergency in the coming weeks.
“What I can say is that the intensity of Cyclone Gabrielle greatly exceeded our expectations and forecasts based on the data we had on hand on the day before the cyclone hit.”
