It was the experience of having my ground floor flooded at Auckland Anniversary Weekend that made me write too cheerfully of the cyclone damage in other places last week. We have some serious renovation work to do downstairs but we can see the extent of it. That helps.
Thereis, of course, no comparison between the scale of my loss and that of many other households in Auckland, let alone the flooded areas of Coromandel, Tairāwhiti and Hawke’s Bay. But I think the same principle applies. When you can see the boundary of a disaster it becomes easier to deal with it.
The frustration of reading and watching news of a disaster from afar is that we’re seldom shown its limits.
It is said the camera cannot lie but it can exaggerate. Television news cameras often make 20 protestors look like a mass demonstration simply by keeping the frame inside the edges of the gathering. Photographers covering earthquake damage, fire or flood might fill their frame with the devastation, or the picture might be cropped to give it more impact.
Written descriptions of a disaster are not much better. I must have read many tens of thousands of words on the cyclone devastation in Hawke’s Bay these past two weeks and, at the time of writing, I still don’t know exactly how much of the province is under mud.
An aerial view of the flooding in Wairoa, Hawke's Bay. Photo / Wairoa District Council
For someone such as me who doesn’t know that region well, it’s been hard to picture where the river valleys are, how flat and wide they are, and how extensive the damage must be. I don’t doubt it is extensive and devastating and unprecedented and all the other words used for it, but words like those do not help me get a grip on it.
I know there are limits to the destruction because we have friends in Havelock North and they tell us they’re all right. They’re probably thinking what I think when a volcanic or seismic event occurs far from Auckland and we get messages from overseas asking if we’re okay. Why didn’t their newspapers print a map?
Soon after the cyclone had passed, a television camera crew accompanied the Prime Minister on a flight over the flooded regions of Hawke’s Bay. We saw him in a helmet, looking down on the scenes below. I was longing to see what he was seeing. The camera had only to pivot a few degrees, which it must have done.
But the footage shown that evening did not include any expansive aerial views, only Chris Hipkins looking stunned, along with tightly focused shots of collapsed buildings and ruined crops down below. I can only assume someone decided the wide overviews did not assist the story.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins and Hawke's Bay Civil Defence and Emergency Management Group Controller Ian McDonald survey cyclone damage to Esk Valley - but the rest of the world may find it difficult to fathom the scale, writes John Roughan. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Not many years ago a Prime Minister well-briefed on the extent of the damage, and having seen it for himself, would have presented a confident face to the public, given the country a balanced assessment of its seriousness and its limits, and might have erred on the side of understatement so as not to alarm people too much.
But those days are gone. The pandemic has shown politicians that a crisis can work wonders for a party in power. The Government reinstated daily press conferences for the Prime Minister and the only bit Hipkins understated was the looting.
A note of alarm may be justified when the threat is a virus and people can do something to avoid it. But when a threat takes the form of extreme weather events, doleful reporting is no help. Climate change requires an adaptation of many things we do and I think the way its consequences are going to be covered needs to change too.
Unremitting stories and images of pain, suffering, damage and loss are debilitating for people who can’t see it for themselves. The scale of the disaster appears so big it seems to defy anything the country can do to contain or reduce the damage when events of a similar magnitude occur.
Ironically, the people feeling least powerless in the face of climate change right now are probably those who have seen the extent of the damage and begun to make decisions about their home, their land and crops.
They might be surprised, as I have been, by the willingness of insurance companies to simply restore what was there. The assessor, when he came, wasn’t much interested in the adaptations I had in mind.
Insurers are in the business of risk and if they have calculated that restoration is still the most economic response to every climatic event, who am I to argue? But I can see a more durable solution. People on the ground usually can.
