Cyclone Gabrielle: Hawke’s Bay’s day of horror - we thought we were grazing a bullet, until it spun around a corner

OPINION:

Three ominous flickers - each about two minutes apart.

That was the warning the whole of Napier and most of Hastings received before the lights went out.

It was always a possibility, but not on this scale. And let me say that it can never happen again.

Right now we’re exhausted. By the end of tomorrow, we’ll probably be fuming.

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Devastatingly, Napier City Council had said at 9pm on Monday that “we think we’ve got this” - or something along those lines.

I saw that statement. I breathed a sigh of relief, and I went to bed. Most like me in urban Hawke’s Bay would have been expecting to wake comfortably.

Damage, sure, but not devastation.

Some residents of Napier's Te Awa Avenue have been asked to evacuate their homes. Photo / Warren Buckland

Down on the flats of the vast and bountiful Heretaunga Plains, it felt on Monday night like we were grazing a bullet from Cyclone Gabrielle.

Then that bullet spun around a corner to sniper us.

From the hills of Patoka and Putorino, Sherenden and Esk, a dirty wall of water poured down towards us.

We knew there was something coming, but local authorities didn’t perhaps comprehend the power of what it could unleash.

Bridges were overwhelmed. Stopbanks breached. A substation swamped. People fled for their lives.

What made it all so strange was how impossible it was for anyone to know what had happened.

It turns out a power cut really can bring two cities to their knees.

Understandably, when the lights flicked off, everyone in Hawke’s Bay immediately moved from power sources to their phones, from their wifi to their 5G and 4G networks. They needed to know what was happening.

A number of residents along Links Road at Waiohiki, near Napier, were rescued today. Photo / Paul Taylor

Soon the networks were failing. We were down to 3G and crawling. Social media posts were all but impossible.

The pictures and videos that people needed to see to warn them were trapped on individual phones and cameras, unable to be shared.

And then, an hour or so later, the mobile networks seemed to crash completely.

Between 10am and noon, it was impossible to make a single call from my outpost in Havelock North. One text went through. A miracle call went through at 12.15pm and cut out after 30 seconds.

It was the worst of all worlds.

Taradale needed to be evacuated and no one could tell them about it. So, too, the poor people in Esk Valley, and Mt Herbert in Central Hawke’s Bay.

There were other communities too, no doubt, but at 12.30pm (the time I wrote this sentence) one of the most informed people in Hawke’s Bay (me, I think) had absolutely no idea what was going on.

A number of residents along Links Road at Waiohiki, near Napier, were rescued via IRB and jet skis. Photo / Paul Taylor

After I wrote the line above I decided I had to drive to get informed. I again tried the office in Hastings. I couldn’t get in (no power) but I could get phone calls from the carpark - sort of. Most cut out.

I followed a sign on a door to the Hastings Sports Centre - it had been set up as a hub for evacuees - in the hope of finding some way to get internet.

There were dozens, maybe hundreds there. There were sausages. There were people lying on mats in the gymnasium in the middle of the day, asleep. The Sikh community dropped off food.

The closest I got to being able to do something useful was when Ruth from Pakowhai saw my phone charger.

She was barefoot, wide-eyed, and exhausted. She told me her phone was flat. She said she’d been awoken in the middle of the night to floodwaters entering her home.

She escaped in waist-deep waters with nothing - nothing but her flat phone.

We sat next to the generator and her phone turned on. She tried to send messages to those she loved. I hope they got through.

After a trip to Civil Defence, we got some of the Hastings team together to korero. But we had limited internet and dubious communications.

I found a landline phone and got through to our Napier office, where the team could operate due to a generator.

There were tired people on the other end of the line in that newsroom, brave people, heroic people. Some of them can’t get back to their homes tonight.

One stopped reporting today to pull a pair back from Marine Parade’s huge waves. From Hastings, it’s hard to fathom the things they’ve seen today.

There will be time to reflect and learn from this after it is all over, but as I wait for communications to resume (again I wrote this line just after 12.30pm today) I have had time to reflect in the midst of a massive natural disaster.

The Tutaekuri River and Ngaruroro Rivers are the reason that Hawke’s Bay has two cities. They quite literally divide Napier and Hastings. Always have, though not like this.

But they will unite us too. We know disasters here, and we know how to recover.

The 1931 earthquake shaped this region in its pain and so, too, will Cyclone Gabrielle. The flood plains that we’ve expanded onto too much (some of them created with that earthquake’s help) have bitten us.

We’ll make plans to ensure they can’t again.

For now, we want to call each other. Once we can do that freely again, we might never stop.

- Chris Hyde is the editor of Hawke’s Bay Today