Cyclone Gabrielle was many things, but it wasn’t unprecedented: Chris Hyde

OPINION

Unprecedented, unbelievable, unfathomable, unparalleled, freakish, incomprehensible.

Many words sum up what Cyclone Gabrielle brought to Hawke’s Bay a year ago.

But not the words above.

After a year of reporting on a storm that hit with a ferocity and scale no one at Hawke’s Bay Today saw coming, I think there is a simpler way to describe Gabrielle:

Believable, precedented, comprehensible.

This was a storm that was coming. A rainmaker cooked up in warm South Pacific seas and delivered with a direct hit to a region of 184,000 people that had forgotten, or had chosen to ignore, the true power of its rivers in a flood event.

The cyclone on February 14 last year hit overnight and into the morning with the ferocity and landslides of Cyclone Bola mixed with the deluge of the 1938 Esk Valley flood.

Poor foresight added another layer of bite to it. For decades we’d crept slowly, homes and businesses, on to river plains that have flooded repeatedly for millennia, at the same time planting heavy forests on to hills that have slipped for millennia.

We paid for it, dearly — eight people dead in Hawke’s Bay, thousands displaced, pets drowned, homes and livelihoods throughout the region ruined.

Today we commemorate those who lost everything, especially those who lost loved ones. It’s hard to know how to do that, and in what form.

In truth there’s no right or wrong answer, other than to be there for one another wherever possible.

One thing we must do is make sure we learn from Gabrielle. There’s no point going through all of this pain to have it happen again in 10 or 100 years.

The buyouts of Category 3 properties are an excruciating example of the region trying to grapple with this. But in other areas, we’ve been slower to swallow our medicine.

Have we moved the Redclyffe substation to stop an entire region from plunging into darkness again? Not yet.

Have we come up with ways to prevent wood debris from wiping out our bridges? Not really.

Have we made more room for floodwaters to flow through our rivers? Not yet.

Have we found a way to stop Wairoa from flooding again in the way it did? Not yet.

What we have moved quickly to do, is elect a new government.

With Luxon, Seymour and Peters, Hawke’s Bay gets a go-getting trio focused on quashing red tape and rebuilding.

In the days and weeks after the cyclone, when diesel was an angel and regulation the devil, that attitude of cutting corners and moving quickly had an understandable allure.

But the inevitability of climate change means we will need more than the leadership in the prevention space if we want to stop our slow march towards even more destructive storms.

The second thing we must do, and we must do it today in particular, is check in on our neighbours.

Gabrielle showed us how important it is, not just for mental health reasons, but preparation. When the next disaster hits, the people most likely to save you if you are in trouble are your neighbours.

Civil Defence won’t be knocking on your door to get you out of the path of a tsunami, the navy ships of supplies are days away, and when the phones go down you won’t be calling your long-distance family for help and comfort.

The community around you, and your survival packs, are your two lifelines.

Our outstanding community got us through the initial stages of Gabrielle recovery. Now we must keep strong the bonds that we formed shovelling lounge rooms of silt together.

So today, go and say hello to people. Have a cup of tea, a beer, a conversation.

Try going to a commemoration event if you’re up to it and wear black and white, even if it feels a bit odd. Think of it as an investment in Hawke’s Bay’s future.

Chris Hyde is editor of Hawke’s Bay Today