Communities rally to pick up the pieces

By JAMES GARDINER

In the hill country of Kimbolton in the northern Manawatu the damage caused by February's storm is still evident everywhere. On a clear day you can see all the North Island's major mountains - Taranaki, Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe - as well as Kapiti and the top of the South Island.

But the foreground is scarred with an immediate reminder of the hand nature dealt in one of the biggest downpours in memory. Thousands of slips have torn large chunks of pasture and topsoil from virtually every hillside.

Fences knocked over or undermined had to be rebuilt. To do that meant restoring not only the roads to the farm but the internal tracks, many of which were washed away or blocked by the slips.

Three months on, for many farmers that work has barely begun. Blocked roads and broken bridges have presented difficulties getting in men and equipment, and the sheer demand for machinery from throughout the region meant farmers had to wait their turn.

For Ian and Annie Harvey, a boost came this week with the arrival of a group of Canterbury farmers, their travel paid by Federated Farmers with a grant from the regional disaster fund. Among them is Andrew Currie from Methven, whose cropping farm was struck by drought in the past year, who has donated his time to build and repair fences.

"Coming up here, you can forget everything that happened in the past few months and just get lost in this," Currie, 37, said. "We can share our disaster experiences."

Federated Farmers' Manawatu-Wanganui president Shelley Dew-Hopkins said in the first few weeks, hundreds of volunteers from outside had come to help. Since then, some people had assumed the problems were over but they weren't. "Some farmers battled on their own thinking they would be all right."

Bringing in other farmers to whom they could relate and trust to work without supervision had been positive. "It's made huge inroads for a lot of guys."

Dew-Hopkins said there were some farmers, including sharemilkers, croppers and foresters, who may never get back on their feet.

In the Manawatu-Wanganui region, which bore the brunt of the storm and suffered most damage (although there was also severe flooding in parts of Wellington, Picton, Central Hawkes Bay and Taranaki), 400 homes are still uninhabitable affecting about 700 people.

Most of the homes are in Feilding, Kopane, Scott's Ferry, Tangimoana, Whangaehu, Horowhenua and Turakina.

In some respects, if such a disaster had to happen anywhere in New Zealand, the Manawatu-Wanganui region was the best place. Horizons, the Palmerston North based regional council, was - and still is - the only council in the country to have in place a Government-approved emergency plan as required by the new (December 2002) Civil Defence Emergency Management Act.

Mark Harrison, who heads Horizons' emergency management office and is regional recovery manager, said Civil Defence officials were "in a perverse way" pleased it happened where it did, where a plan was in place which functioned and demonstrated to other "sceptical" councils what should be done.

"Geographically, it's a huge area," Harrison says. "There are seven local authorities within the region plus the regional council itself. It covers 22,000sq/km, 250,000 people and I have yet to hear of anyone even injuring themselves."

The weather event was little short of incredible. Rain which started in most places on Saturday did not stop until Monday. Two days later there was more heavy rain and two days after that more again, followed by gales.

"If you'd come up with that as a [civil defence] training scenario, you would have been laughed out of the room," Harrison says.

States of emergency were declared by the Rangitikei District Council in Marton on Monday morning, quickly followed by the Feilding-based Manawatu District Council.

Access and information were the biggest headaches for those trying to co-ordinate the disaster response. Half of the 9300km of roads in the region were closed by floodwaters, slips, fallen trees or powerlines. Horizons staff's river gauges were swept away. Emergency services wanted to know which roads were open but so many were closed it was impossible to find out. "We rang farmers but they couldn't tell us because their access was cut off," Harrison says.

Ross Dallas was driving home from the V8 car racing at Pukekohe on the Sunday night. The further south he got the wetter it got and he realised that the Kopane School, on which he is board treasurer, could be in trouble.

About 2.45am and he rang his mate Stephen Sanson, the board chairman, and another board member and they went to the school on Rongotea Rd beside the Oroua River to find the water ankle-deep.

"We stacked all the books and equipment up high and were sitting down in the staffroom having a cup of tea when the fire brigade came in and said, 'You've got to get out'."

By that stage, about 4.30am, the water was waist-deep. The torrent intensified later that day, lifting the school and community hall off its piles, moving it sideways 2m and smashing it into a classroom. Now there are doubts about whether the school will ever reopen.

The situation has become political. Locals are suspicious that despite the moratorium announced by Education Minister Trevor Mallard on school closures, the ministry wants to use the floods as an excuse.

The two-teacher school has a roll of just 17, which normally fluctuates up to the mid-30s, but the uncertainty over its future and its present temporary premises at a nearby hall mean little chance of new enrolments.

Dallas says because the school was insured it would be wrong to use the floods as an excuse for closure, although he admits it might not have survived a review.

A public meeting last week drew 60 people, many of them former pupils and others in the community who make use of the school's pool, tennis court and hall. A sign now hanging outside the school reads: "Please Trev, let us come home".

Further south, where the flood plains flatten out and the Manawatu River, swelled by the Oroua and the Mangahao, meanders its way out to sea at Foxton, stopbanks dominate the landscape.

Without them there would be no farming and when the stopbanks fail, as they did, there can be no farming.

At Koputaroa, north of Levin, where Nathan Guy and his father farm 324ha, they estimate their costs to date from the flooding at up to $500,000.

That includes resowing the farm in grass seed, replacing fences, water supplies, and the cost of grazing stock on other farmers' land in the meantime.

Guy is a Horowhenua District councillor and his father is on the regional council. They have stated publicly that they are considering suing Horizons over the failure of the stopbanks on the grounds they were neither as high nor as wide as they should have been.

"We'll recover a fair amount through the Government package, which means we pay the first $10,000, then they pay 70 per cent of the infrastructure costs," Guy said.

That includes regrassing, boundary fences, water supply, essential access and trees but it does not include internal fencing and there is a question mark over whether weed sprays and fertilisers are covered.

Guy said farmers were also concerned about how banks would deal with customers, many of whom would go without income as well as having to pay out and get receipts for repairs before being eligible to apply for the government assistance.

On the other side of the Tararua Ranges, Keith Riley is a sharemilking dairy farmer. Riley, whose wife Kim made headlines by being helped to safety by her cow, is facing substantial losses.

Most of the 330ha farm outside Woodville was under water for 24 hours when the Manawatu River spilled 1.5km over its banks. He has had to cut cow numbers from 860 to 400 while the grass regrows, paying for grazing off, grass seed and rebuilding farm races.

Heavy silting between 5cm and 30cm deep still covers 160ha. The rotary milking shed was under water and the equipment had be dried out and repaired. Normal milk solid production of 340,000kg for the season was down by 60,000 (equivalent to just under $250,000 income, which is uninsured). But Riley admits it could have been worse.

"If you're going to have a flood - and we knew we were going to have floods here - February was a good time to have it."

The bulk of the milk had been produced and there was still time before winter to re-establish pastures for the next milking season, which runs from August to May.

Riley has been more than impressed by the community support and the huge national goodwill in the form of millions of dollars in cash and donated goods.

"It's been humbling. It's made a huge difference to morale. You just feel like urban people have got a measure of understanding of what was going on. It makes you pretty proud to be a kiwi."

As the full impact of the flooding sank in and the plight of its many victims became understood, New Zealanders opened their hearts and wallets.

Various appeals, spearheaded by TVNZ's Holmes show, which raised in excess of $2 million, and matched dollar-for-dollar by the Government, have amassed more than $10 million, most of which has been distributed.

Donations of food, household goods, clothing, bedding and children's toys came by the truckload from all over the country. While gratefully received, the gifts have turned into a logistical nightmare. Council officials are reluctant to say they wished it would stop. "We didn't want to appear ungrateful," said one, "but frankly a lot of it was junk".

A huge warehouse in Palmerston North is still more than a third full of donated goods and the cost of storing it is about $10,000 a week. A hall in Feilding is similarly packed with racks of clothing, thousands of shoes and boxes of bedding.

Although mindful that many people have still not returned to their homes and may be in need in the coming months, a decision has been made to wind up it up early next month with a giant garage sale. Proceeds will be available for further cash grants.

When Charlie and Ella Bodger first saw their home a week after the tiny Rangitikei settlement of Scott's Ferry was inundated with floodwaters they declared it was the end.

Like their neighbours, they could only watch forlornly as Army soldiers tramped through the polluted water and mud and dumped all their household possessions in piles on the roadside to be loaded into skip bins.

For Charlie Bodger, a retired pharmacist, that included his prized collection of tools and wood-turning equipment, ruined by silt and rust. "I'm nearing 90 and I just won't start again," he said at the time.

But this week they were back in their garden, planting vegetables and weeding. They have had a change of heart and their house is being dried out and rebuilt.

"Initially nobody was ever coming back but now everyone is," Charlie said.

Ella said after they got over the shock the decision to move back was relatively easy. "We've got to keep going. Where else would we live? We don't want to live in town, we like it here."

FLOOD RELIEF

The help

Donations to Red Cross - $4.69 million consisting of:

Public donations through Holmes show $1.41 million

ANZ Bank $166,000

National Bank $154,000

Progressive supermarkets $154,000

The Warehouse $57,000

Government $1.25 million

Other funds from:

Christchurch City Council $100,000

Other councils $144,000

Manawatu District disaster fund $300,000

Other businesses $40,000

Federated Farmers $465,000

Red Cross disaster fund $100,000

The Payouts

Farmers (1014) $3.6 million

Evacuated home occupiers (572) $1.02 million

The Damage

2300 evacuated from homes

1014 farms flood-damaged

400 homes still uninhabitable

922 people still out of their homes

$112m insurance claims

$77.6 million damage to roads and bridges

$24 million damage to rivers

$10 million soil conservation remedial work