Heavy rain is causing yet more havoc across Auckland. Video / Dean Purcell / Supplied
An Esk Valley resident lucky to escape Cyclone Gabrielle’s deadly wall of water and mud says his family weren’t told to try to evacuate the area until shortly before they sought refuge on their roof.
Some residents further upstream from the rural hamlet on the outskirts of Napier were alerted around 11pm on the night of February 13 to leave given the huge rainfall and risk of swollen rivers flooding.
But the McKendry family, who live on SH5 close to the turnoff leading to Napier, did not receive a Civil Defence warning to evacuate until 5.24am the following morning.
By that time the water – described by Michael McKendry as “less of a flood, more of a tsunami event with the speed [of it]” - had already claimed lives and destroyed homes and livelihoods.
When their phones went off with the alert, the McKendrys were sitting on a sofa they had placed on top of their kitchen table in a bid to keep out of the water rapidly rising through their house.
And 30 minutes later they were clambering up the side of their house seeking safety on the roof as floodwater eventually made its way up to the gutter line.
“If something is to come out of this, it would be around evacuations,” McKendry said.
“It would have been good if we had of had a recommended evacuation of some sort [much earlier]. [Nearby] Hukarere Girls’ got evacuated, the kennels up the road got evacuated and another place up the road got evacuated at about 1am.
“We woke up to water coming in our windows at 2.45am. The water was already up to the bottom of our window sills at that point.
“It was until 5.24am, nearly a full three hours later, that we got the Civil Defence warning while we were sitting on our coach on our kitchen table, to say low-lying areas of Eskdale [were] to evacuate.”
Almost two weeks on from the fateful night, the McKendry house is like many others in the area.
Large areas of Esk Valley were devastated by the water and walls of mud and silt created by Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo / George Heard
The section is covered in mud and silt – which are turning boggy again with the latest rain over the past 48 hours – the badly damaged house itself has a tide line near the gutter where the floodwaters reached.
McKendry said they would never have stayed at the property had they received an earlier warning.
“We are not wanting ours to be some sort of sob story ... we just want there to be learnings,” he said.
“The biggest thing for us was the no warning [to evacuate earlier].
“We knew this was a flood area, however if you are evacuating upstream, at 11pm the night before, then why not have a chat to the other people in the area.
“We would have just gone to Grandma’s. She is in Parklands [in Napier] and the only thing she has had to worry about is no power and the contents of her freezer like so many other people because the power was off for so long.”
New Zealand Defence Force staff helped evacuate people from Esk Valley near Napier on Friday as heavy rain threatens to flood the area. Photo / Paul Taylor
On Friday, Civil Defence sent out an evacuation alert for people in the Esk Valley ahead of forecast heavy overnight rain.
At a media briefing on Friday, Hawke’s Bay Civil Defence Emergency Group Controller Ian Macdonald pushed back against a question that the evacuation order for Esk Valley during Cyclone Gabrielle came too late for residents, some of whom did not get notice until after 5am as floodwaters swept through the area.
“That was a completely different event,” he said.
“That was very short notice, the amount of rain that we got was well above what was originally forecast ... we’ve got some warning, we’ve known about this for the last day and a half.”
Macdonald said authorities didn’t have the same warning about the severity of Cyclone Gabrielle before it decimated Esk Valley and other parts of Hawke’s Bay.
He said Friday’s evac notice was a pre-emptive and conservative approach.
“I do not want to be rescuing people off the top of roofs at short notice and I think this is the best thing to do for their safety and our first responders.”
Emergency services and the NZDF spent Friday afternoon sweeping through the devastated Esk Valley to ensure the safety of everyone, including contractors working to clear roads.
“We actually don’t know a lot about the [Esk] river at the moment because of all of the silt. So the behaviour of the river to even this sort of rain is why we are taking a conservative approach to this.”
Macdonald said he hoped people would be able to return to Esk Valley today, dependent on the weather conditions.
