Words: Simon Wilson
Photos: Brett Phibbs
Editor: Stuart Dye
Sub-editor: Isobel Marriner
Design: Paul Slater
PART ONE: Afghan biscuits
Shalema Wanden-Hannay thought she was prepared. She’s the co-ordinator of the Resilient Karekare Network, a volunteer community group in the isolated Karekare settlement on Auckland’s isolated west coast.
Back in December the group had created an emergency management plan, which they’d printed, laminated and distributed to all households. Now they were getting early warning reports about the approach of Cyclone Gabrielle. On Sunday, February 12, the day before the storm arrived, they met to review their plans. They knew what to do and they were ready.
Shalema did not expect that when she went banging on doors the next night, the flood water rising around her, she would not be able to persuade her neighbours to evacuate.
Nor did she expect she would be crawling on her hands and knees, through mud and over broken trees that were slipping from the hills above, in the dark, in the driving rain and roaring winds, not knowing who was alive and who was dead or if she herself would survive.
She did not expect that most of her family would be doing the same.
The Wanden-Hannays live on a ridge above the valley floor at the end of Karekare Rd. From their wraparound picture windows they look down across the bush and the gravel car park to the dunes, the stream winding its way to the sea, the towering Watchman bluff beyond. Lines of surf pound away in the distance. Kererū fly past at window level. There are pōhutukawa, nīkau, karaka and kauri everywhere you look. It’s extremely beautiful.
Shalema has long dark hair, a fierce, attentive gaze and a way of speaking that’s articulate and forceful. In her day job, she’s a community developer. She thinks of herself as short, but that’s only because everyone else in her immediate family is tall.
Husband Shawn, gangly and bullet-headed, is a police officer. Daughter Jess is a university student and a safety officer in the film industry; older son Ben attends Henderson High and younger son Tom is at Glen Eden Intermediate.
Karekare is home to their wider family, too. Shalema’s sister Bex lives with her husband Mat and their three boys, up on the hill just off the Piha Rd. Shalema and Bex’s parents Karel and Caroline also live nearby, at the top of Lone Kauri Rd.
Karel is a retired teacher with deep experience in mountaineering, tramping and volunteer firefighting. He’s still deputy chief of the local volunteer fire brigade.
He’s a big-beard-and-knobbly-knees kind of guy, in a fleece with shorts and thick wool socks. The boots he climbs into when we go for a walk are about as big and bashed about as they come. He’s short, like Shalema, and when he speaks he studies your face intently. Also like Shalema.
Father and daughter are both life members of the surf lifesaving club, whose new clubhouse is perched on the edge of the estuary, visible through those picture windows. Jess is a patrol captain and all three, along with Ben, are lifeguards and members of the emergency response roster.
This is a family geared to the outdoors and the extreme challenges it can throw at you. They’re trained and experienced and they’re intensely community minded.
We like to think we’re a resilient lot in this country, that we pull together when we need to. And largely that’s true. But what happened in Karekare when Gabrielle came roaring through holds a counter-story. Things go wrong.
Choosing wisely and being brave are not the same. Doing the right thing is much, much harder than you might think.
Left to right: Bex Walton-Hannay, Shalema with husband Shawn Wanden-Hannay, Karel Witten-Hannah with grandchildren Jess Wanden-Hannay, Tom and Ben Wanden-Hannay photographed at the ruins of Amber Rhodes’ house.
Left to right: Bex Walton-Hannay, Shalema with husband Shawn Wanden-Hannay, Karel Witten-Hannah with grandchildren Jess Wanden-Hannay, Tom and Ben Wanden-Hannay photographed at the ruins of Amber Rhodes’ house.
Karekare is just south of Piha. It has about 60 houses, half of them permanent residences and the other half holiday homes. The beach is wild and glorious, the sea dangerous and the bush walks challenging. Te Kawerau ā Maki once had extensive kūmara gardens inland from here.
There are two roads in, both branching off Piha Rd, which runs along the ridge at the top of the ranges. Lone Kauri Rd winds the long way down, around the sides of the hills, but Karekare Rd plummets head-first into the valley. The locals call it the Cutting. Bullocks once hauled wagons loaded with kauri logs up this track: a feat that defies the imagination.
Two streams feed into the valley. Like the two roads, they join near the car park by the dunes. There’s a narrow river flat and many of the houses are built along it. Others perch on the ridges and cliffs above, some with steep drive-on access, others just with steps or staircases.
It’s often stormy on the coast and the residents are used to floods and power cuts. They don’t seem to mind: it’s the price they pay for living in paradise. But Gabrielle was different.
The Cutting
The Cutting
We’re gathered in the Wanden-Hannays’ main room. There’s a coffee machine that gets frequent use and Bex has baked a big plate of afghans. It looks for a while like no one is going to touch them, but after the first hour the plate steadily empties. They’re really good afghans.
Sixteen-year-old Ben is sprawled in a corner, his younger brother is somewhere else in the house; the rest of us sit on couches and armchairs in a rough circle.
Shalema explains that her emergency network had divided the entire Karekare area into seven neighbourhoods, with a response team in each. They set up WhatsApp groups.
In the valley, group member Claire Inwood had drawn up lists of the houses. They identified which ones were most at risk, or would need help, perhaps because they had small children or elderly residents. Houses were colour coded, red, orange and green, according to their vulnerability. Inwood had asked the owners of empty baches for permission to evacuate people into them.
The power went out on the Saturday and again on the Sunday. Karel says the firefighters used their regular practice time to clear culverts and pull trees out of the stream.
The plan focused on flooding, because that was their common experience in the valley. No one expected landslides. As Karel puts it, “I didn’t realise the hillsides would check themselves out.”
Were they ready? “We knew it was coming,” says Shalema, “but we didn’t really know.”
On the Monday, Shawn and Jess were at West Harbour Fire Station, 30 kilometres away at Westgate. On duty, as part of a lifeguard emergency response team, in case of floods in the city’s northwest.
“We expected to be driving IRBs (inflatable rubber boats) in Kumeū,” says Shawn. “I’d just completed a course in it.”
But Kumeū didn’t flood. Gabrielle lashed the whole city with wind and rain, but reserved its cruellest blows for the Waitākere Ranges and the beach communities beyond.
The calm before the cyclone - Auckland on Saturday night before the weather warnings of Cyclone Gabrielle bring the bad weather. Photo / Dean Purcell
Shalema and her two boys were at home, along with Bex and her family. By late afternoon the wind was high and there was flooding in the valley. “I saw a twister out the window,” says Bex. “On the land, you know, it was the size of a house.”
The estuary filled with water: the dunes, the road to the surf club, the whole wetland area. When a slip came down on the side of the Watchman, it was “like an iceberg calving”.
The power had been back on after the Sunday outage, but went out again about 4pm.
A couple of hours later, Shalema’s friend and neighbour Amber Rhodes arrived. She’d come down Lone Kauri Rd but couldn’t get the rest of the way home because the road had “basically turned into a river”. The two women went down Shalema’s drive, linked arms and “river-crossed” to the other side, so Amber could walk on home. Shalema returned through the river on her own.
The Karekare Surf Club at Karekare Beach.
Karel was with a crew at the fire station near the top of Lone Kauri Rd. As the callouts about slips started coming in, they loaded chainsaws and other tools into his Hilux and drove down the Cutting.
“We got to the bottom about 7.50pm and started to do a check along the valley,” he says. “We got as far as Amber’s house. It was in the middle of the road.”
Amber Rhodes and her home before and after Cyclone Gabrielle struck. Photos / Supplied, Hayden Woodward
Amber Rhodes and her home before and after Cyclone Gabrielle struck. Photos / Supplied, Hayden Woodward
The calm before the cyclone - Auckland on Saturday night before the weather warnings of Cyclone Gabrielle bring the bad weather. Photo / Dean Purcell
The calm before the cyclone - Auckland on Saturday night before the weather warnings of Cyclone Gabrielle bring the bad weather. Photo / Dean Purcell
The Karekare Surf Club at Karekare Beach.
The Karekare Surf Club at Karekare Beach.
The house had been hit by a mudslide. Karel called it in and texted Shalema. “The text said, ‘Amber’s house is on the road’,” says Shalema. “That was it. That was the message we received, in this house full of children. The response was …”
Shalema stops talking and looks at her hands. “Basically we were pretty shocked to hear that. This is my very dear friend, we didn’t know if she was alive, I’d just walked her across the stream. I was actually pretty f**king scared for her life, and for her family.”
It was dusk and the floodwaters were still rising. They decided Shalema, Bex and 16-year-old Ben would go to help, while Bex’s husband Mat would stay with the four younger children.
“So we really quickly put on wetsuits and grabbed a rescue tube,” says Shalema.
“We had a climbing rope, too,” says Bex.
“I put the rescue tube on me,” says Shalema. “I had it round my waist. I was thinking, ‘I need a rescue tube potentially to rescue people, with the floodwater’, but then I’m thinking, ‘Well, if you’re in the stream and you’ve got a rescue tube on you could get snagged on all sorts of things, so it could be the one thing that kills you.’
“And then, my son Ben, I decided to let him make his own call, because I didn’t want to be the person, you know, the call I made could be the wrong one and he could die as a result of that.’ So he didn’t have a rescue tube.”
Jess Wanden-Hannah with her Grampa, Karel Witten-Hannah.
Jess Wanden-Hannah with her Grampa, Karel Witten-Hannah.
The distance to Amber’s house is about 400 metres. At the flooded road they linked arms, with Shalema in the middle because she was the shortest. The water came up to her ribs.
“I lost my footing completely. If I hadn’t been between these two I would have been gone.”
When they arrived they saw the house on the road, but they also saw Amber and her family, alive. Karel and his crew were there too.
“It was quite a traumatic experience for me, seeing that and then finding her and hugging her and saying, ‘I thought you were dead’. It was pretty f**king awful.”
As the family tell this story, there’s a good deal laughter. It’s the laughter of nervous release. By this point, though, Shalema is in tears. Karel is good with the hugs.
The house looked like some giant had smashed it to bits then pushed all the rubble into a pile. But the dining table and a chest of drawers had survived, so they pulled them free and put them aside on the driveway.
“And then,” says Shalema, “I went up to her car and closed the boot.” Bex thought she might move it away to safety, but Amber decided it was better off where it was.
Later, Amber told them how she, her husband Paul and 13-year-old daughter Beatrix had felt a thud at the back of the house, so they started to gather things to evacuate. Then there was another thud, they realised the hill was sliding and Amber screamed at them, “Run, run, run!”. The concrete steps disintegrated under them as they escaped and the house came down seconds later.
Shalema and Karel agreed it was time to start evacuating people. She went across the road and knocked on the door of a new house belonging to Gareth Abraham, a schoolteacher, and his partner. They had taken in the Rhodes family when their house came down.
“I said, ‘We might get another two hours’ worth of rain, the floodwaters could double, you need to evacuate now.’ It took a little bit of persuading. It was like, ‘Oh, do you think so?’ And this was where a house has just come down the drive on to the road opposite.”
“And,” says Bex, “Ben and me were literally standing in the water next to her, with it rising.”
Gareth’s house is brand new, built to strict council requirements on a platform above the creek which runs along the bottom of the section. He believed they were safe because flood-resistance had cost them a lot of money.
In fact, he told me later, floods are entertainment for the kids. They put chairs by the windows and play a kind of Pooh sticks, watching the debris in the water and trying to guess which bits will move fastest.
Neither he nor anyone else had anticipated the hillsides falling on to the road.
Behind Shalema, Karel shifted his truck just as “a whole heap of mud and debris” came down and wedged him against a power pole. “It was too steep for me to get round and it was tipping my truck over, so Ben and one of the firefighters dug away at it while it was still moving.”
“At that point,” says Bex, “I was on the phone to Jess and I’m like, ‘Grampa’s trapped’, and then I basically hung up on her.”
Shalema’s daughter Jess and husband Shawn were still at the West Harbour fire station. “I didn’t know,” says Jess. “Did that meant trapped in something, or trapped between? I assumed it was between two slips because she’d be yelling a bit more if he was trapped in something.”
Jess called Karel’s wife Caroline, to ask what she’d heard. “Nana didn’t really know too much about anything. But she said to me, ‘I hope Karel survives the night’.”
“I was like, this is it, we need to go, this is our community.” With a new shift coming on at West Harbour, she and Shawn headed for home.
“Meanwhile I’m banging on doors,” says Shalema. “One after the other, I’m saying to people, ‘You need to get out, you need to evacuate, you need to get your stuff together now.’ In a quite direct, forceful way. And I go to the next house, where the guy’s having his noodles, he was much harder to evacuate, and then I went to the next house, same thing. ‘You need to get out now!’”
They had a plan, but when it came time to put it into action, something else happened. People didn’t like being shouted at.
“Some people have this mindset,” says Shalema.
“They think, ‘We’ve lived through the flooding before’,” says Karel. “’It comes up and then it goes down quickly.’”
The remains of a house after a major landslide on Lone Kauri Rd.
The remains of a house after a major landslide on Lone Kauri Rd.
But Gareth’s family did agree to go, along with Amber and her family, and Bex offered them all her own house at the top of the Cutting. “It’s still pissing down,” says Karel. “So I get Amber and Pauly and Bea into my truck and we start heading up the road and the others follow in their people mover.”
Before long they met up with Karel’s firefighter friend Ezra, and the Abrahams were transferred to Ezra’s ute.
“It’s well after 8 o’clock, it’s dark, and we come to a point in the road where, it’s like those pictures you see of a rain-slide disaster in Nepal, there’s a torrent of mud, rock, trees, just pouring across the road in front of us. So we do the magic multi-point turns and start to head back down. And in front of us there’s another avalanche coming across the road. So we’re basically between two slips.”
Karel doesn’t like the word trapped. “Trapped is a loose word. I was determined not to be trapped. We didn’t know how much of the rest of the hillside had come down and we had these two families in our responsibility.
“So we took Amber’s family out of our ute, so there’s just me in it. And I started to go through this avalanche of rock. While it was moving. I got into it and I hit some big rocks and couldn’t go forward. That was the scary moment. But fortunately I was able to back up a couple of metres, and my mate Ezra said, ‘Go for it.’ So I went at it again with a bit more velocity, downhill, and I managed to punch a way through.
“Then we put the rest of the people in Ezra’s ute, and they followed my path through that thing.”
How frightening was it?
“Well, my frightened moment would be when I was stuck in it. Once I had punched through it, I wasn’t frightened anymore. Not then, anyway. I was frightened later on.”
When they reached the valley floor they decided not to risk driving through the floodwaters, and abandoned the vehicles. They had life jackets from the fire brigade kit, but not enough for everyone. They had torches, but they tried not to use them in case they’d need them later.
They made their way carefully along the flooded road. “I was about four or five metres behind the person in front of me,” says Karel, choking up as he relives it. “And I just face plant. Because I can’t see.”
Shalema and Ben carried on with evacuations, along with a young member of the fire brigade and the surf club, who was “carrying a deaf dog”. Bex stayed by the road so that if things went badly, she would be able to go for help.
“If we’d floated past she would have done something,” says Shalema.
After “about an hour and a quarter”, alone in the dark and the torrential rain, Bex decided they must be safe, so she went to a nearby friend’s house. “I texted my husband and said, ‘We’re not coming back tonight, have fun with the kids, don’t leave the house.’”
Photos / Supplied
Shalema and the others were still knocking on doors. She’s in tears, remembering. What do you do, when people just say no?
Finally, she says, she had an idea. “I said to this man, ‘You need to lead us and these other people up to the track. Please lead us to safety.’ And then he said, ‘Right, I’ll come.’”
“You gave him agency,” says Karel.
“It worked,” says Shalema. “We went out and he led the way. There’s no track. We bushbashed, quite vertically, up to meet a track, and the other guy with us was carrying his deaf dog. That dog was really well behaved. “
Eventually, they met up with Karel and his group, picked up Bex, and safe houses were arranged for everyone who needed them, including Gareth and Amber’s families.
The family headed back through the floodwaters for home, the firefighters with them. The water was still moving fast and the storm had not let up. They linked arms to get across, which again saved them, because they walked into a log under the water.
“If we hadn’t been linked up,” says Bex, “that would have been it.”
Everyone was exhausted and Karel was very cold. His heavy brigade uniform was wet through and he knew he was at risk of hypothermia.
Shalema and Bex wanted him to stay, but the firefighters were heading back up Lone Kauri Rd, on foot, and Karel announced he was going with them.
Karel says, “I was thinking, ‘I’m the most experienced in our brigade. They might need me.’ He says he told them he was cold and they were looking after him. “And I had a personal locator beacon.”
“When I said goodbye to Dad,” says Shalema, “I compartmentalised in my head that I was not going to see him again. I thought that was it. I didn’t want him to go, but I just, you know, Dad’s a stubborn bastard, there’s nothing we can do to make him stay. That might be it.”
He says he didn’t think he had hypothermia but he also knew he’d fallen over “more times than I normally would”.
Shalema said to him, “Are you coming back?”
He told her, “We’re not going to make it back.”
Photos / Supplied
Photos / Supplied
It was about 9.30pm. The firefighters climbed over the big first slip “and the stream is a raging torrent, it’s over knee-deep across the road”, over more slips with the mud “like porridge”, over fallen trees, edging their way uphill in the raging stormy dark.
Ezra had phoned their mate Piripi, who was able to drive a ute down some of the way to meet them. Karel, who was now “really cold”, got in the car and the others went to check on slips and households on tracks off Lone Kauri.
Piripi and Karel headed for home, but new debris had fallen across the road just in the short time since Piripi had driven down. So Karel sent him back and walked on by himself.
“You asked me before, was I frightened? Yeah, I was. The noise. The noise of the rain, the wind, the crashing branches, and I could see the power wires down.”
He phoned his wife Caroline and for the first time that evening managed to get through. “I asked her to come and pick me up. Until then she didn’t know where I was.”
Caroline had been in touch with Shalema and Bex all evening, but they didn’t tell her much.
“I was lying to Mum,” says Bex.
“Saying that I was all right,” says Karel, “when she didn’t have a bloody clue.”
She found him shortly before 11pm, got him home and warmed him up. “I had some tea and went to bed,” he says. It was “mild hypothermia”, he says.
He’s “timeless”, he says, when I ask him how old he is. Shalema tells me he’s 70. That road is 8km long.
When Shawn and Jess drove away from the West Harbour fire station, having heard Karel was “trapped”, they had no idea how far they would get, what they would find or what they would be able to do. They assumed he was somewhere in the Cutting.
West Harbour fire station. Photo / Google Maps
West Harbour fire station. Photo / Google Maps
Shawn drove and Jess was on a WhatsApp family chat group, “with everyone apart from Nana in it”.
“I said, ‘Is everyone okay?’” Bex, alone in the storm, waiting for Shalema, replied, “I love you.”
“We weren’t too confident,” says Jess. “That was the last message I got.”
They made it to the top of the Cutting, suited up into their wetsuits and left the car. Jess had a helmet and Shawn was wearing a life jacket, and she had her phone in a waterproof pouch. They didn’t have a rope and their torches were weak. Although Shalema had bought the family four Dolphins, Shawn and Jess couldn’t find theirs.
Almost straightaway, they came to a tree across the road.
“So we start climbing over this tree and this mud,” says Jess, “and then next minute we’re on a 50-metre long landslide, right at the top. I was waist-deep in mud. I shine my torch up and the whole thing is just water and mud and it’s active and you’re just looking up at this — ”
“It’s kind of flowing,” says Shawn.
“This is the first big slip. And we’re going, like, ‘Ho-Ly’ There’s water running down, and rocks and stuff. We’re standing on a road with about a hundred-metre drop on one side and then a sheer cliff above us and I’m thinking that at any time there could be a landslide from above, covering us, or at any time the road could go out from under us.”
Suddenly, they realised they might die. Jess sobs as she talks. “I remember thinking to myself that if, you know, if we get trapped in a landslide, I hope we’re together. You know? If we’re trapped in the mud then we’ll be together.”
They were used to surf lifesaving and fire-service rescues, with teams of people and helicopters and all the gear. “But no one’s coming. We were on our own.”
Shawn had told the police at West Harbour their plan was to get to Karekare, but they knew no one would be able to get to them.
Shalema, listening to this, says, “It’s Black Hawk Down stuff.”
They kept going, crawling over the landslides, the air filled with “booms and cracks”, trying to stay close, trying at least to stay within earshot.
“We had to crawl. You couldn’t walk.”
“You’d get stuck — ”
“You reach down and free your foot from it.”
“You’re up to your knees.”
“And you can feel it moving, you know the road could go at any time, but you have to keep going, there’s no turning back.”
Then they saw torches coming round a corner below them.
Jess thought it would be firefighters. Shawn expected to meet Karel. They both assumed they were being rescued. But it was two road workers, Tuff and Haydon, who’d been sent out much earlier to clear trees off the road and become trapped. They’d abandoned their truck and were just as frightened as Jess and Shawn.
“So Dad went, ‘I’m a police officer, I’m a lifeguard, you’re fine, we’ll get you out of here.’ And we started to walk them down with us, through the landslides.”
Haydon got badly stuck, and Shawn and Tuff had to pull him out. They talked to each other about fate.
“When you’re on that stretch of road,” says Jess, “it’s nature’s day. Does nature want to put a landslide into you or not? You’ve got no control, if it wants to take you, it takes you.”
“One slip was like a waterfall,” says Shawn. “I remember thinking, ‘Where’s the best place to cross?’” Through the main flow of water, or right by the outer edge? “All that water, one slip at that point and we would have gone down into the valley.”
“One of them wanted to stop,” says Jess, “but I said, ‘Guys, I know you’re tired but we have to keep going, we need to get off this road. The longer you’re on this road the greater the likelihood of being crushed by a slip.’”
When they reached the valley floor things were easier. “We had places to run,” says Jess.
“But we knew Mum and Ben were missing and we wanted to find them. The first priority was to get Tuff and Haydon to safety, so we could keep searching. We came across Karel’s truck, so Dad and I are just screaming into the night, ‘Shalema! Karel! Mum! Ben!’ Just screaming our heads off, hoping they’ll hear us.”
Then Jess got a message from Caroline: they were safe. “That was a massive relief. But then Haydon says, ‘I’m having an asthma attack’. We’re still halfway down the valley and Dad says to me, ‘Why don’t you run ahead?’ because we knew there was an inhaler at home. So I was like, ‘Sweet’.
“I ran ahead and started crawling through these slips, and across this river that’s running across the road, by myself in the dark, and then I ran up the driveway and opened the door and my little brother helped me get the inhaler, and I basically said, ‘Hi’ and ran off back into the storm.”
“It was a complete shock,” says Shalema. “They were supposed to be in town, and it’s the middle of the storm and there’s my daughter on the doorstep.”
“And she’s going back through the floodwater,” says Bex. “She was gone again before we even think, ‘Hang on, we don’t want her crossing the floodwater by herself.’”
But Jess was already back in it. “It’s really hard, going against the stream. And then I was running around in the dark, I got confused which house we planned to meet at. I’m knocking on windows, screaming, ‘Shawn! Shawn!’”
A neighbour came out and pointed her in the right direction. She arrived to find Shawn helping the roadworkers get dry.
“I gave them the inhaler and we left them at this safe house for the night.”
Jess and Shawn crossed the river together and returned home. The rest of the family were there, all safe, except Karel. They texted Caroline and she told them he was home, too. “Just mildly hypothermic but we’ve got him.”
They felt relieved, exhilarated, exhausted, happy to be all safe. After “a bit of a family debrief”, they tried to get some sleep, Bex’s family doubling up with Shalema’s in the beds.
Shortly after midnight, they heard “a massive rumbling sound”. The land just beyond the top rear corner of the house had slipped.
“It was boulders rolling on top of each other, like a roar of stuff coming down. But then there was a beautiful tinkling sound. It’s pretty weird to say that, but it was the boulders rolling on top of each other.”
But even that wasn’t the end of it. At 4.03am, Karel was woken by a call to tell him his friends Chrissie and David Sidwell, an elderly couple who lived in the valley, were trapped in their house. He rushed over to the fire station, but they realised there was nothing they could do.
Karel cries, now, telling this story. “Our friends are trapped and the slip is still moving. And I know I can’t get there. So I ring Jess.”
Karel did not know, at this point, that two volunteer firefighters at nearby Muriwai, men he knew well, were missing. Caroline, Shalema and the others knew but they’d decided not to tell him.
Down at Shalema’s, says Jess, they “spring into action. We start grabbing torches, stripping off and putting on our freezing cold wetsuits that are out in the rain, and Mum’s running and grabbing axes, hatchets, sledgehammers, ropes.”
The Sidwells’ house is up a steep slope above the road and they thought it had probably slipped down the hill. That would mean a very difficult rescue.
The Sidwell house.
The Sidwell house.
Because of her work as a film-set safety officer, Jess had two large Pelican cases of emergency gear, including oxygen bottles, a defibrillator and other trauma equipment. They took the lot.
The rescue party was Shalema, Shawn, Ben and Jess. “That equipment,” says Shalema. “I was carrying like a full-sized axe and sledgehammers and a little hammer and hatchet, plus spades, and I had the heavy rope. Like, this stuff was seriously heavy. We had more than I could reasonably carry. And we were thigh deep on Shawn, going through the river. Deeper on me.”
“Tummy deep on me,” says Jess. “And we’re dragging this equipment.”
“And the road was nothing like what we knew,” says Shalema. “There was a big nīkau log in it, all the tar seal had been ripped up, it was like the road was hitting me on my shins.”
“And you can’t see,” says Jess. “You’re going against the flow, so it’s just awful walking across it. Then we get a bit further along the road and there’s a new slip that’s come down since Dad and I went through.
“We did have this conversation,” says Shalema. “It’s like, ‘Can we just leave the equipment?’”
“But we need it,” says Jess.
“But it’s just so heavy,” says Shalema.
They got to Amber’s house, exhausted, and saw it had been pushed further on to the road. The table and chest of drawers they’d rescued were back in the rubble and so was the car Amber had thought would be safe.
Lone Kauri Road. Photo / Kane Hopkins
Lone Kauri Road. Photo / Kane Hopkins
The Sidwells lived a bit further up on the hill. The house hadn’t come down but the long wooden staircase leading up to it was hanging, broken and unusable. The hillsides around the house had slipped away. It was perched up there, leaning dangerously, water streaming down the muddy cliff.
“And these trees looking like they’re about to fall,” says Jess. “There’s no way we could get up. Even staying where we were on the road, we’re going, ‘We could be covered by a landslide.’
“So basically,” says Shalema, “I said, ‘We can’t do this. We just can’t. Even if we could get up there, we couldn’t bring them down.’ I thought, ‘We’re going to die if we do this’. And Jess was like, ‘But these are our friends and we’ve got to do something.’ And I’m like, ‘No’.”
Shawn says he felt the same. “We all made the call, all four of us. We couldn’t be there.”
They retreated to the shelter of a nearby house and Jess called 111, to ask if there was any way to get “proof of life”. Shalema says they still weren’t safe. “I’m like, ‘We need to leave this whole area, we need to get out of here really fast.’ It just felt like the whole f**king thing was going to come down.”
On the last stretch back home, they were crawling through the big new landslide, still carrying all the gear, when it started to move. Jess and Ben were on the other side, Shalema was close to getting through and Shawn was still in the middle of it.
“I’m on my hands and knees,” says Shalema.
“Dad’s in it,” says Jess. “He’s moving metres. Mum’s yelling at Ben and me to run — ”
“I’m trapped in it,” says Shawn.
“And Mum’s trapped in it, too,” says Jess.
To make it easier for herself, Shalema threw her tools to the kids.
“I threw them beside where the children were. And they were yelling, ‘Don’t throw the tools at us!’ But it wasn’t at them, so we were having a bit of a fight. Like I’m literally crawling through the mud, and it’s moving, and I’m yelling at the kids, ‘Run!’ Because I think this whole cliff is coming down on top of us, right now. And the kids were not running.
“And Shawn’s yelling, ‘I can’t f**king run, I’m stuck in the mud!’ And I’m yelling, ‘I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to the kids!’ And I’m yelling at them, ‘Run for your lives!’ And they’re standing there, going, ‘Mum, throw Dad the rope!’ We were having this massive family argument.”
“So we made it out of that landslide,” says Jess, “and Dad got given the rope. We get Dad out of the slip, we get Mum out of the slip, make it back across the river, come home. And then, you know, we’re living with the reality that we’ve had to leave our friends and we think they’re dead or dying. It was an awful, awful thing.”
“I came home and I cried,” says Shalema. “Because I thought, these people are dead and we haven’t been able to do anything.”
PART TWO: Ginger crunch and banana cake
The soil lies shallow on the land. The Waitākere Ranges are made from volcanic rock and lava, with a thin covering of earth held in place by tree roots that can’t always penetrate to a surer footing. Too much rain and it all slips away.
The bay at the north end of the beach is called Tāhoro, which means “pour out” or “knock down”. Sir Bob Harvey, who has a beach house at Karekare, translates it as the Bay of Avalanches.
The Karekare Rd is still there. Even the steepest parts of the Cutting survived the storm, because it’s carved into the rock face. The soil and trees poured down the gullies, over the road and on down the precipitous cliffs. But they didn’t break the road away.
Sir Bob Harvey at Karekare Beach. Photo / Dean Purcell
Sir Bob Harvey at Karekare Beach. Photo / Dean Purcell
It’s a small blessing.
On the morning after the storm, Tuesday February 14, 5-year-old Archie Patterson got up and took his Lego outside to play. He and his family were staying the night with his grandparents, David and Susie Munro, who live two houses up the ridge from the Wanden-Hannays.
Archie played on the lawn for a while and then came back inside. The adults were stirring, and he said to them, “The grass looks different.”
They went to see. The end of the lawn, which used to slope away into mānuka scrub, had disappeared into the gully below. A swing, tied to a plank cantilevered from a tree, hung over the void.
“We’ve got an infinity lawn now,” says David. “Complete with infinity swing.”
We’re having coffee at the big table in the family room, with ginger crunch and banana cake. The Munros built this house and have lived in it for 43 years, raising six kids and adding a higgledy clutch of bedrooms up the back. There’s a big woodstove in the middle of the room, a balcony out the front and picture windows on three sides.
On the day of the storm the Munros watched the weather wreak its havoc on their valley. Susie Munro was worried about the Sidwells: she and Chrissie Sidwell are sisters and phone contact had been intermittent.
David was more relaxed. “We knew their staircase down to the road had gone,” he says, “but that house has a steel frame, it was built to withstand anything. We thought, ‘Well, that’s fine, they’re tucked up in bed. We can leave them alone, you know, wait till daylight.’”
Shortly after Susie and David went to bed, they were woken by a roar. They looked out of the window: the hillside behind them was collapsing.
“Even though it was very dark,” says David, “the underside of the nīkaus are a silvery colour. You could see them, racing down the hill.” But the house was built on solid rock and they decided to stay where they were.
Claire Inwood, the member of Shalema’s volunteer group who had organised the evacuation sites, spent the night with several displaced neighbours. They knew about Amber Rhodes’ house and others on the road, and that the Sidwells’ staircase was broken, but they didn’t know the couple were in danger.
At 6.35am on the Tuesday, Inwood called them anyway, just to check they were okay.
David Sidwell told her they were not. The house was off its foundations and a steel joist had thrust up into the bedroom, right beside the bed. They were still trapped inside and they were terrified.
He told her there was another set of stairs in the bush nearby and they could probably get up using that. Inwood and her friends rushed over and found Shalema already there.
An argument broke out. Shalema, still believing the whole hillside was too dangerous, refused to let anyone go up using the other stairs.
“In the event,” says David, “they were rescued by a guy in the house next door. He’d come out the previous day, never been to Karekare before, and he wakes in the morning and the neighbour’s house is not there.”
The visitor laid a long plank from the bank to the house, and the Sidwells were able to crawl across it. Then all three came down the hill together, using the other staircase.
“Locals looking after each other, eh,” says David. “That’s what happens.”
Severe Tropical Cyclone Gabrielle killed 11 people, including the two volunteer firefighters at Muriwai, a beach settlement north of Karekare. This makes it our deadliest weather event since Cyclone Giselle, better known as the Wahine storm, in 1968.
Gabrielle displaced an estimated 10,000 people from their homes and did so much damage to communications networks that at one point 6960 people were officially unaccounted for.
On the Tuesday morning in Karekare, everyone got together. “It was really super-helpful,” says Shalema Wanden-Hannay. “We identified who’s in the community, where have we evacuated people to, what empty houses are left.” There were 97 people, including 19 children, and 26 of them had been displaced.
Resident Michael Glazer, a chef, organised a kitchen and for those first few days, with helicopters bringing in supplies, he ran a crew of volunteers to feed the community. The kitchen helped bring everyone together, but many people had questions about the volunteer emergency response.
There was frustration about the evacuation process and especially about how the Sidwells’ situation was handled. David Munro posted a question on WhatsApp: What good things did the emergency response achieve that night?
I asked him what his own answer was, and he said there weren’t any.
The surf club is the hub of the community and it’s fractured now. David is president; Shalema and her family are active members. Gareth Abraham is a surf lifesaver; Susie Munro and Chrissie Sidwell manage the hall bookings.
The club plans a review, but no one seems to be looking forward to it. Auckland Emergency Management and Fire and Emergency NZ will also have roles.
Is it best just to move on? “I think this is a pretty robust country,” says David. “Everyone pitches in to the best of their understanding and capacity.”
But he also identifies a few things he hopes will change. Lessons for communities everywhere, perhaps.
One is that places like Karekare need fully functional mobile phone coverage; another that emergency services need strong lines of communication.
When David Sidwell placed his 111 call, the request for help was routed to Karel, who rang his granddaughter Jess. It seems nobody else was advised.
A third issue: evacuation plans don’t need to treat new houses built to resist floods as if they’re old baches sitting on a swamp.
Fourth: plans are invaluable but so is flexibility. It was still daylight when houses started falling on to the road, but it didn’t cause a rethink. “If it had been realised then that houses like the Sidwells’ were in danger,” says David Munro, “they could have been evacuated in good time.”
There’s one more thing. He chooses his words carefully.
“I think the leadership in an emergency can’t be the people undertaking the response. You need calm, clear heads.”
The wreckage of Amber Rhodes’ house has been cleared away but there are still other piles of debris along the road. We saw people loading trailers on one of our visits: locals who were leaving. Some will return, others won’t. Most will stay if they possibly can.
“This is paradise,” says David. “It’s the most beautiful part of New Zealand. Even on the busiest day, you can still go down to that beach and feel like you’re the only person in the world.”
At the Munros’ house, Gareth Abraham has come to say hello. Fortified by the ginger crunch, he eyes the infinity swing. He gives the rope a really good pull. It creaks, but it holds, so he sits and pushes himself out over the precipice. He looks anxious.
David talks about fundraising. Get your photo taken on the swing, hanging above the devastation, with paradise all around.
“This is paradise. It’s the most beautiful part of New Zealand. Even on the busiest day, you can still go down to that beach and feel like you’re the only person in the world.”
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