Residents in the cut-off town of Wairoa describe the moment Cyclone Gabrielle hit. Video / George Heard
Dee Southall has twice lost her home to two of the biggest natural disasters New Zealand has seen in the last 15 years.
She and her partner Brendan moved to Hawke’s Bay from Australia in 2020 to be closer to their grandchildren and run a Cookie Time franchise.
They were lucky enough to narrowly avoid losing their belongings shortly after their arrival, packed and on top of pallets in a storage unit that was flooded in the Napier flooding of November 2020.
They weren’t so lucky in February 2023 while living in a rental property off Pākōwhai Rd, where they were hit with floodwaters that consumed their home and much of their belongings, including sentimental and irreplaceable photographs.
She said they heard floodwater coming through their gate at the same moment a Civil Defence alert came through on their phones telling them to evacuate.
Dee Southall and her partner Brendan. Southall's home was red-zoned in the 2011 Christchurch Earthquakes and now she and her partner have lost everything in Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo / Supplied
“It burst through in a great roar, and then it flowed,” Southall said.
“For me to say ‘we need to get on the roof’ is a pretty big call, because I am utterly terrified of heights, but I grew up near rivers so I knew straight away when that second wave came through that this [was] not going to stop.”
She said they alerted their neighbours to get on the roof and watched as the torrent of water rose past the windows of her and her partner’s work van.
“Then the dead sheep started floating through, and the hay bales, and the cows frantically swimming.”
Southall managed to call her daughter in Taupō during a moment of clear reception to let her know the situation so she could pass on information to emergency services and Civil Defence.
She doesn’t know how long they were up there before a helicopter came and began to evacuate people.
What Southall and her partner Brendan saw from the roof of their rental home in Pākōwhai before they were rescued during Cyclone Gabrielle.
Nearly 12 years earlier, Southall was living in a house in the eastern Christchurch suburb of Dallington.
She had lived in the house for only two weeks before the first earthquake and went on to live with no power or water for 12 weeks, with sewage and liquefaction overflowing around her.
“The house was red-stickered, but there was basically nowhere else to go.”
She said the two disasters were very different experiences and hard to compare.
“The earthquakes and the shaking and the not knowing what was going to happen was harder to live through because it was a constant everyday occurrence, whereas the floods were sudden and a one-off, but I lost more. I lost everything.”
Southall said her partner had put their laptops and physical photos, including an album of photos his grandad had taken during the war while he was in the navy, between the top of the kitchen cabinets and roof before the water had risen during Cyclone Gabrielle, thinking the water would not reach that high.
“We were rummaging through the mud for 10 days trying to find precious little bits and pieces.”
Southall searching for salvageable items in her home in the days following Cyclone Gabrielle.
She said they were able to salvage some of the war photos, but many baby photos and all the photos on the laptops were lost.
“If nothing else, what I have learned from this is, when your phone or email comes up saying your back-up storage is now full, pay to have the extra space to back up photos. It might take hours, but sit there and scan those photos into the cloud.”
Although they were insured, nearly all of the rest of their household belongings were lost, and Southall said she is still sometimes reminded of things they haven’t replaced yet.
Southall and her partner have been lucky enough to find another rental to live in since the cyclone, but she said her friends now know her as a “natural disaster magnet”.
“They are asking me where I live, so they know not to live there.”
