There are countless  stories of the agony endured by Hawke’s Bay and Tairāwhiti residents when silt, forestry slash and floodwaters swept through remote settlements and suburban streets early on Tuesday.

The horror came, for many, under a cloak of darkness and without warning.

By 10pm on Monday, Tairāwhiti Civil Defence had posted an “urgent flood warning” on its Facebook page — telling some residents in low lying areas to “move now” and noting the council was having trouble with its flood warning text system. But 130km to the south, Hawke’s Bay Civil Defence had an hour and half earlier told its Facebook followers there was “no need” for residents not already told to evacuate to do so.

“We [are] constantly monitoring the situation … if evacuation is required overnight, teams will be deployed to advise residents.”

It wasn’t till 2.58am that Hastings District Council posted on Facebook that river levels in the Esk Valley, north of Napier, were “dangerously high” and residents in lower lying areas should evacuate “as soon as possible”, with emergency services on the scene to help.

Niwa records would later show the 175.8mm recorded at Napier Airport in the 24 hours to 9am Tuesday made it the city’s second wettest February day in 73 years. At Maunganui, north of the city, 200mm fell in just 12 hours to 7am Tuesday.

Before then some Esk Valley residents had  smashed their way into ceiling cavities in a desperate attempt to escape a seven-metre surge of water washing through their homes.

On Maik Beekmans’ farm, his house-sitter Gareth and partner first sought refuge on the kitchen bench after floodwaters ripped through the house —  submerged, despite its 1.2m flood protection piles  — at “absolutely mad speed” about 2.30am.

With the water rising and no escape, the pair smashed through Gib board and clambered into the ceiling space, Beekmans told RNZ Checkpoint.

“[The] a 40-foot container took the front half of our house off … [and] the house actually opened up.”

With water rising into their ceiling sanctuary the pair began climbing on to the roof, but a log separated them and Gareth’s partner “disappeared underwater”.

A helicopter would later airlift Gareth to safety. He was one of hundreds plucked from roofs by rescue and Air Force helicopters, including migrant orchard workers, young families and the elderly, one group of 60 people, and a man with a broken back and arm.

Others were rescued or evacuated by boats, flatbed trucks and Army Unimogs; 700 New Zealand Defence Force staff had been sent to help.

Not all made it to the relative safety of their roof. Sonya Kilmister and her children Ella and 7-year-old Toby, spent eight hours clinging to a branch after floodwaters almost covered  their home in Dartmoor Rd, west of Napier, at 5.30am.

“[But] she had to let my little dog go”, daughter Molly Leigh said.

By yesterday, nine people — including a child and a woman — were known to have died in Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne and Auckland.
But coastal residents of Napier’s Bay View say they saw several bodies washed away by raging floodwaters on Tuesday morning. On Thursday, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins warned the country that with about 3500 people still unaccounted for in cut-off Tairāwhiti and Hawke’s Bay, the death toll was expected to rise.

It was a concern shared by former Havelock North mayor Jeff Whittaker. He first became aware of the disaster unfolding in the valley below his Esk Ridge home when a Civil Defence alert came through on his phone at 5.30am.

By first light, at 7am, he was looking at a valley that resembled a bay.

“It was just full of water … [and] we could see people on top of houses waving.”

Further north, Wairoa found itself both physically and technologically isolated. The Wairoa River’s breached banks had put the homes of half of its 8000 residents underwater.

Mayor Craig Little, using Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites, posted a video message online to reassure worried families.

“It’s been an absolutely devastating flood event, but everybody has been accounted for.”

Other small communities lost much when the rain turned relentless early on Tuesday.

In Te Karaka, 30km northeast of Gisborne — whose Niwa Fernside station notched 375mm in the 24 hours to Tuesday morning — 500 people were evacuated from their homes at 5am as the Waipāoa River breached in multiple places, destroying properties in its path.

One resident told the Breakfast television programme that she’d been forced to swim out of her house with her two children.

“My house filled up in like five minutes.”

Twenty-seven hours waiting on a hill brought safety, but no solace.

Another resident told Breakfast: “We watched our town basically get drowned.”

The country was beginning to see the widespread scale of Gabrielle’s impact. By 8.43am on Tuesday our third state of national emergency had been signed.

By nightfall, 10,500 people were known to be displaced — 9000 in Hawke’s Bay — and 225,000 households across the North Island remained without power.

The days since have been busy for the hardest-hit communities.

Questions have been asked — about preparedness in the hours before the wall of water swept through a tranquil rural valley, and what we must do before another weather system super-charged by the changing climate crosses our shores.

More needed to be done on power, communications and roading infrastructure resilience, the Prime Minister said, and his Government would address forestry slash and wider land use issues.

“We cannot continue the way we have been going. We are going to see more of these weather events.”

Hours after Cyclone Gabrielle’s most devastating impacts, Climate Change Minister James Shaw told Parliament he’d never felt “as sad or as angry” about the wasted decades spent arguing whether climate change was real.

“Because it’s clearly here now, and if we do not act, it will get worse.”

Outside, beyond the walls of the Beehive, the  cicadas still had their own buzz going, hollering for a mate in their few short weeks of adult life.

Even the smallest cogs in nature’s machine have their song to sing, one so powerful that Māori call them kihikihi  wawā — “to roar like the sound of heavy rain.”