Flood, sweat and tears

Under clear skies, the people of the Bay of Plenty are now looking at scenes of devastation and counting their losses. STEPHEN COOK reports on a week of tragedy, trauma and dogged survival

In the space of a few short minutes, Bob Freeman lost everything. His house, his car, his campervan - and the woman he loved.

Entombed in the mud after a huge mudslide and a large pohutukawa crushed her home at Bryans Beach, it is difficult to imagine the terror of Beverley Freeman's final moments.

Minutes before, the 67-year-old retiree had been doggedly digging a drain at the back of the property to clear her mud-clogged section after 48 hours of torrential rain.

Then the earth came crashing down.

Bob Freeman managed to scramble to safety but his wife wasn't so lucky.

Police and rescuers were quickly on the scene. But with fading, desperate hopes that a voice, a whimper or a sigh might be heard from deep beneath the silt and sludge, they too had to run for their lives as a second landslide smashed down on the Freemans' home.

The body of Beverley Freeman was eventually recovered on Monday, two days after the landslide. Her funeral is today. Friends of Bob Freeman have no idea how he will cope with his loss. All they know is that it will be tough. As it will be for the dozens of families left counting their losses after the worst floods to hit the eastern Bay in more than 50 years.

Some have lost everything. At least 700 houses were damaged. Some will have to be torn down. At least half were not insured.

Of 184 flooded houses inspected, 104 are too badly water-damaged for people to live in. Of 40 properties hit by slips, eight are uninhabitable and 11 are livable, but residents will have to be re-evacuated should moderate or heavy rain fall.

An early, conservative estimate of the cost to fix road damage stands at $5.5 million.

The storm, accompanied by a string of earthquakes, has delivered a devastating one-two blow to the swamped residents of Edgecumbe, Whakatane, Ohope, Awakeri, Ruatoki, Ruatuhuna, Opotiki and Waimana.

The huge clean-up operation has begun in earnest, but for many it will be months before they are back on their feet.

"I have no idea how many of these people are going to cope," says Leanne Taia, a resident of sodden Awatapu. "The worst hit have been the low-income families. It's not as though they can go to the bank and get a loan."

The cost is expected to run into tens of millions of dollars. Already the Earthquake Commission has received claims totalling $7 million. There will be many more to come.

Ray Burton is among those who have lost their homes. "I'm going to have to tear my place down and rebuild it," he says. "It's devastating. I've lost a lot of things I can never replace."

Work and Income New Zealand has already provided around $10,000 in emergency grants. Its regional commissioner, Carl Crafar, expects staff to deal with around 150 people a day for the next two weeks.

For farmers, the floods that swept over much of the Rangitaiki Plains and other low-lying areas of the eastern Bay of Plenty could not have come at a worse time, with calving well under way.

Federated Farmers estimates between 400 and 500 dairy farms will have suffered to varying degrees from the deluge, which began on Thursday night and finally stopped on Sunday. About 200ha of farmland and 200ha of orchards have been affected.

The storm had been well anticipated - there were severe weather warnings from the MetService. But not even seasoned weather-watchers predicted the devastation. The origins of the monster deluge were from a large high-pressure system that shifted on Thursday to the east of the Chatham Islands and then stopped moving.

From there, a frontal rain band moved on to the North Island from the Tasman Sea, but was blocked by the high and stalled over the Bay. The north-south front over the Bay then linked with a low-pressure system that formed between Norfolk Island and the Kermadecs, combining with northeasterly winds. The result was 264mm of rainfall over 48 hours. The average rainfall for this time of year in the Bay is around 130mm.

"There is nothing unusual in having a low-pressure system moving on to New Zealand from the subtropics," says the MetService's Bob McDavitt.

"However, the amount of rain delivered by this low raised the rivers to a level they haven't seen since 1998."

Eventually nature's onslaught became too much for the Whakatane and Rangitaiki Rivers which burst through stopbanks on Saturday, flooding thousands of hectares of farmland, turning streets into rivers and fields into lakes.

At their peak, the Whakatane River was 7m and the Rangitaiki River 5m above normal. A state of civil emergency was declared in Opotiki on Saturday evening and a few hours later extended across the entire region. Civil Defence swung into action and around 500 people were moved out of Te Teko, Waiatahi, and Bryans Beach, while other residents in the district were put on standby as the threat of evacuation intensified.

One of the worst-hit areas was the Whakatane suburb of Awatapu, where the rain transformed the dozen or so streets into a watery wasteland.

Many of the residents there had a sleepless Saturday night.

"This is hundreds of millions of dollars, but that's not the real thing. It's the impact on the individual, the families, the farmers - absolutely everybody's life work is absolutely destroyed," Whakatane Mayor Colin Hammond said.

Farmers worked well into the night, battling to get livestock to higher ground . But not all stock was saved.

Some farmers will have no idea of their losses for at least another week. They also had to pack livestock on to the little land that remains dry, putting it at risk.

Pekatahi farmer Bruce Powell has just 15ha of his 80ha farm available for stock, and many others are in a similar situation.

Kiwifruit growers in the Bay of Plenty who had blocks under water are also nervously waiting to see how quickly the flooding recedes. Although the harvest is well and truly over, vines will suffer damage if the water does not clear in a few days.

Throughout the week access to the region was severely restricted, with many parts of State Highway 2 blocked by slips and surface flooding. The Matata Straights became a sodden time bomb when two days of heavy rain exploded into an avalanche of slips.

By the end of Saturday there had been one casualty: Ohiwa's Beverley Freeman. There were incredible tales of survival.

Colin Ratlidge and his king charles spaniel Chelsea had set off on Saturday afternoon to join his mate down Ohiwa Harbour Rd near Opotiki to watch the All Blacks play the Wallabies. Less than 20m along the way, the pair were caught by a mudslide and carried across the road into the harbour.

It was pitch dark, cold and high tide was approaching. After several hours trapped in mud and salt water, a neighbour heard Ratlidge's cries. The neighbour grabbed a torch, headed down the hill and managed to get the frozen 74-year-old out of the mire.

Chelsea also survived. Buried in mud with the waves washing over her, she was pulled from the tide by another of Ratlidge's neighbours.

Others weren't so lucky. Apart from the Freeman home, at least four houses around Ohiwa Harbour were destroyed by landslides, while others remained in danger from slips.

One owned by Jim and Pam Greenaway is still sitting precariously on the edge of a newly formed cliff.

"The house is as stable as you can expect but it is going to be a very difficult job to retain it," Mr Greenaway said.

In Ohope, a couple were forced to make a mad dash after dozens of mature pohutukawa trees and tonnes of mud cascaded down a 70m drop towards their West End home, eventually ending up just metres from their back doorstep. But that was just the start of the multi-million dollar trail of devastation.

Driven by incessant overnight rain, the deluge tore a watery swath across the rest of the eastern Bay on Sunday forcing mass evacuations in Whakatane and Edgecumbe, and cutting off already isolated Ruatuhuna.

Thousands of hectares of farmland already under water were further inundated as huge volumes of water were spilled from the Matahina hydro-electricity dam that was filled beyond capacity.

Mother Nature still wasn't through.

Like a bad joke, she delivered a concentrated flurry of at least a dozen quakes, centred 20km north-west of Kawerau, the biggest measuring 5.4 on the Richter scale.

Some shocks triggered landslides across the Bay of Plenty making work even harder for weary Civil Defence workers.

For already waterlogged residents the quakes were the final indignity.

"If the floods and the mess weren't bad enough, then we get all these earthquakes," said Whakatane's John Johnstone. "It's like someone has got it in for us. It's just not fair."

In a freak accident, the earthquakes claimed the life of 55-year-old Rotorua woman Marilyn Erica Robinson, who died after a large eucalyptus tree fell on her car.

By Monday the rain had stopped and the skies had cleared. Then, the true extent of the damage could be assessed.

Good fortune isn't usually the first thing you think of when floodwaters are lapping at your feet and your living room is full of mud, but many escaped relatively lightly.

"We were certainly one of the lucky ones," said Awatapu resident Devero Durham. "We are going to be damp for a while, but there's been no major damage."

On Monday morning more evacuations were taking place around the coastal town of Thornton, where river levels were still rising, while for a time the Edgecumbe power station, which supplies the entire eastern Bay of Plenty, was also threatened by flooding .

During the day engineers had constructed a series of exit canals to redirect the flood water from the 150m-long breach at Te Teko, south-west of Edgecumbe, into the Rangitaiki River away from the farms, houses and roads.

Then work began on the bigger task of repairing the breach in the stop bank. The first step was to build a makeshift road across saturated farm land so trucks with trailer loads of rocks could reach the gap in the stop bank and plug it.

With the waters receding, by Monday night hundreds of homeowners were able to return to their properties but at least 500 others had to stay in temporary accommodation at places such as the Whakatane War Memorial Hall and the Wairaka Marae.

Volunteers and local businesses all rallied to help the flood-affected families. The relief effort was in full momentum.

"The outpouring of generosity has been incredible," said Whakatane district councillor Rachael Byrne. "We've had up to 1200 people here and no one has gone hungry. The word has gone out and everyone has pitched in to help."

Most of the residents of Edgecumbe stranded by the floodwaters had returned home by Tuesday. By Wednesday the worst was over and most of the residents of Awatapu could return home and confront their losses.

Since Sunday, Awatapu had resembled a poor man's Pauanui but in the space of about 10 hours the streets were dramatically transformed when tens of thousands of litres of water were pumped into the Whakatane River, leaving behind streets of mud and silt.

The worst-hit families had been those occupying Housing Corporation rental homes. Many were uninsured and what little they had had been ruined.

"I've seen lots of people breaking down. A lot have gone home to nothing," said Awatapu resident Chris Martin.

Whakatane deputy mayor Brian Birkett sympathises. "These are low-income people. A lot are elderly. They will need the most help of anyone."

There was a further shock for residents on Wednesday morning when another earthquake struck just after 3am, measuring 4.4 on the Richter scale, triggering several new slips.

Although some settlements are still completely isolated with no road access, most of the flood victims are now back in their homes. Most children will return to school next week. But it will be a while before life gets back to normal.

The state of emergency was still in place yesterday and the cleanup efforts will carry on long into next month at least.

For many residents the grim reality of their losses are slowly beginning to sink in.

"Some residents had gone through Cyclone Bola in the 1980s, but the damage from this is worse," Ruatahuna's Graeme Willoughby said.

Brian Birkett knows only too well what the people of the Bay are facing.

"We've moved into the recovery phase now, but for many people it will be a long long time before things revert back to normal.

He is full of praise for all those who have been involved in the recovery effort: council staff, volunteers, insurance assessors, the Fire Service and Police, the New Zealand Army, welfare agencies, and Civil Defence.

"We could not have asked for better. From day one there has been a co-ordinated approach to this disaster.

"The needs of everyone have been met under very trying circumstances. The recovery effort has been terrific."

But for people like Bob Freeman there will be no recovery.

"My heart goes out to Bob. He will carry this with him for the rest of his life," said Mr Birkett. "But we are a tough and resilient bunch here in the Bay. We will do whatever to help people like Bob get through this."