KEY POINTS:
Among the most arresting images of the damage inflicted by the wild weather that lashed the country this week were those of roofless houses. Nothing is so evocative of human vulnerability than the sight of our little lives open to the sky. The fridge that suddenly sits not in a kitchen but in the great outdoors is a picture that transfixes us because it upends the established order of things so completely. More than the sight of a beached boat or a fallen tree, it depicts us at our most naked, when the elements have penetrated deep into our lives and mocked the comforting notion that we can be safe in our homes.
Mercifully, if not miraculously, no one was killed or injured in the days of rage. Credit for that should go in part to dumb luck, but in good measure to our national character as well. New Zealanders don't tend to drive through swollen streams as more urbanised northern hemisphere folk might. We are smart enough to know when nature's got the upper hand and we should be standing aside to let it pass.
The storms have also shown again, if further proof were needed, how well we work together in times of strife. In most small communities where people had to be evacuated from their homes, they were willingly taken in by neighbours who had escaped the brunt of the weather. The unflappable demeanour of those who had lost everything was a credit to them. What tears there were - such as those of a Taranaki woman who had almost lost her 5-year-old grandson as water poured waist-deep through their home - were tears of relief.
On the debit side of the ledger were the fortunately few instances of looting, and the remarkable numbers of people, particularly in the East Coast Bays of North Shore City, who ignored advice to stay at home and went sightseeing. Apart from exposing themselves to danger and getting in the way of crews working hard to repair damage and restore essential services, they demonstrated the distasteful ghoulishness of those untouched by disaster who seek to quantify the precise extent of their lucky escape.
The rain is still pecking at Northland but the worst is over and it is time to embark on the clean-up and count the cost. And, in doing so, we should consider what lessons may be learned from the experience.
Prime Minister Helen Clark took some heat for suggesting that residents of settlements repeatedly hit by adverse weather may have to consider moving, but the idea deserves consideration. She made the remarks while standing in the flood-ravaged Northland town of Kaeo, which has been inundated twice this year. Plainly the weather throughout the history of such settlements has not argued that their siting is unsafe or they would have not developed as they have. But changing climate patterns mean that the future cannot necessarily simply replicate the past.
Communities ravaged by flood will receive - and are entitled to expect - generous taxpayer support as they rebuild their homes and lives. That is part of the duty we owe each other in a civilised society. But that does not entitle any of us to put ourselves in - or refuse to remove ourselves from - harm's way and expect everyone else to pick up the pieces.
The idea that whole communities should be uprooted, with no thought to the patterns of living that have made them what they are, is distasteful. But such wholesale change is not what is being suggested. It makes sense for us to take steps to accommodate the callous unpredictability of a climate that can turn as ugly as it did this week because the climate won't be doing anything to accommodate us. We have been warned.
