Cyclone Gabrielle: Napier couple swam through paddocks to find safety

By RNZ

Lily Fearn and Ethan Cross were at their North Shore Rd home, north of Napier, on Tuesday cleaning up and salvaging what they could.

Water about 2m high had swept through the home, throwing their furnishings about and leaving the entire home caked shin-deep in mud.

There was not much left to salvage but Fearn was philosophical about what they had lost.

“It’s just stuff. It can be replaced. But we had moments to make the right calls and we don’t even know to this day if they could have been fatal. We’re very, very lucky.”

Fearn and Cross were monitoring the situation on the night of February 13 when the cyclone hit but there was nothing to suggest the danger that was coming.

“We went for a drive ... because we heard people were evacuating. But we thought it was about the sea, we thought the sea was angry. We weren’t worried,” she said.

They went to sleep but Fearn awoke at about 4am.

“I said ‘there’s a strange smell in the room, can you close the windows’. And my partner gets out of bed and he screams and says ‘We need to get out of here’,” Fearn said.

“You could not hear anything,” Cross said.

“I didn’t even have my eyes opened and I just sort of rolled out of bed and it was just freezing cold and just so high. So I started yelling ‘Get up, we need to get out’. It was so quick.”

By the time the pair had scrambled to get some clothes on, the water had risen another 10 centimetres.

When they got out to the kitchen the water was already up to the kitchen bench, Lily Fearn and Ethan Cross say. Photo / RNZ / Tim Brown

“We get out to the kitchen and it was up to the kitchen bench,” Cross said.

“We got out to the car and it was nearly covering the car.”

The couple were able to clamber onto the roof of their home by climbing onto the car.

But the roof they were standing on was only clear polycarbonate. It gave way under Fearn’s feet and sent her plunging back into the floodwater.

Cross helped her get back to the relative safety of the roof.

“When we got up there it was freezing cold. I was shaking uncontrollably. It was still really windy and absolutely pelting down,” Cross said.

“I don’t know how anyone could’ve lasted that long up there - it was so cold. I still had my phone and I called her dad and he said ‘You need to find some raincoats or something’ and I thought ‘How?’.”

The couple is back cleaning up and salvaging what they can after the flooding. Photo / RNZ / Tim Brown

But Cross knew that in a nearby garage, by chance, he had a tarpaulin stored on one of the shelves.

“That’s when Ethan thought ‘oh, we need a tarp’. So he gets back down and I didn’t think I was going to see him again,” Fearn said.

“The current was just huge.

“Ethan got a tarp from the garage and we wrapped ourselves in that because the rain was just stinging us.”

That was when the horror of what was occurring around them set in.

“You could hear just so much panic everywhere. So many people just panicking,” Fearn said.

“We just held each other on the roof. I was screaming, screaming for dear life. But he was keeping me calm. I’m very grateful to be here.”

In the darkness they saw their next door neighbours moving through the floodwater.

“They were trying to save their sister next door, who was alone in the house. They were swimming through and they shouted out ‘come, come, follow us’,” Fearn said.

“Us being Kiwis we were just like ‘Are you sure you are saying come with us? Are you sure it’s OK?’ and they said ‘Yeah, come on’. So we started swimming all the way down through the paddocks, gripping on to trees. It was insane.

“Ethan gripped onto me. He would go to one tree and pull me tree-to-tree. Horses were trying to get out. There was absolute panic.”

Fearn and her father had a pretty clear view of what Cross had done during that terrifying morning.

“He’s an absolute hero. I’m so bloody lucky to have him,” she said.

But Cross did not see it that way.

“I feel like everyone would do the same thing,” he said.

“You’ve got to look after the people you love and just do whatever you have to do at the time.”

Cross heaped praised on their neighbours.

“They clothed us as soon as we got dry. If it wasn’t for them we would’ve been up on the roof for god knows how long. But they took us in, gave us somewhere to sleep and fed us for about four days. So we can’t thank them enough.”

Fearn said her thoughts were with their neighbours Ella and Jack Collins, who lost their 2-year-old Ivy in the floodwaters on that awful Tuesday morning.

“I wish we could have done more. That’s where I hit a wall sometimes,” Fearn said.

“I wish we could have seen people. It was dark, we couldn’t see anyone. You try to go to sleep at night and that’s when it all starts flickering past and you see it all again. That’s the hard part.”

- RNZ