It was a sunny summer’s day when a wall of mud and water overcame a part of Wairoa. As the threat of winter approaches, the question remains — what on earth happened here? Chris Hyde reports.
Sylvia Bell sits on a chair at the dining room table. There’s a May morning chill in the air and it’s harsher inside than out.
The 79-year-old looks around at the wooden shell of her Mackley St house of 50 years.
It’s the home where she raised a family with her late husband. And it’s the home where she intended to spend the rest of her life.
But while the lumber yard next door has returned to its familiar and welcome chug of industry in the past few weeks, there’s little hope of Bell getting back to a similar sense of normality.
Her home is yellow-stickered and she can’t sleep in it, but for now she is allowed to sit in it during the daytime. And so she does. Every morning. Thinking.
“I need to sit here,” she says. “I need to look around, to reminisce. So I can get over it.”
It will take Bell, and all the flood-hit community of North Clyde in Wairoa, a long time to get over February 14.
They’d woken that morning to a calm sunrise, thinking they had escaped the cyclone’s wrath. Then, some time between 7am and 8am, the Wairoa River’s banks were breached at the showgrounds, spilling onto a floodplain in almost the same manner as Cyclone Bola 35 years before.
Spill from a power station upstream was partially to blame for that breach in the 80s, but this time Genesis says it didn’t spill anything.
The theory this time is that woody debris — let’s call it slash — piled up deep in the hill-country tributaries until it dammed, and then catastrophically breached.
Wairoa District Deputy Mayor Denise Eaglesome-Karekare says the town needs to know what happened, and quickly.
The water came from somewhere, and it will come again in the next weather event, unless things change, she says.
“We woke up and on Tuesday morning, the sun was shining. I went out and I thought, wow, we’ve dodged a bullet, this is amazing, this is awesome. And then 20 minutes later, the wall of water was coming at us.
“Now we’re in the same position as we were 35 years ago with Bola, and frankly, it’s not acceptable. I’m not going to let this go.”
Eaglesome-Karekare’s house is in the flooded North Clyde zone and has also been yellow-stickered. But this is an issue for everyone, she says.
“If the river didn’t breach at North Clyde, it would have come around the bend and it would have flooded this — the whole of Wairoa.
“It was at low tide as well. If this had happened to us at high tide and at night we would have had fatalities.”
Eaglesome-Karekare says there are still many living in yellow-stickered homes in North Clyde as winter approaches.
One of them is Terina Henare’s whanau in Waihirere Rd. Henare, her dad and her partner are preparing for a moisture test on their home, which had no insurance when Cyclone Gabrielle struck.
In the past three months, they’ve been doing piecemeal jobs on the house and clearing it of an astonishing amount of mud that caked up in, around, and under the house. The last of it was cleared only last week.
“It was just like a wall of s***,” Henare says of the river breaching.
“It wasn’t a tsunami, it wasn’t a watery thing or a wave, but you could just see things slowly moving out there in the paddock, the paddock moving. It was different.
“As we were watching it, we didn’t notice the water had already pushed in underneath the house and within 38 minutes, we were on the roof.
“And it was a sunny day, you know.
“I’m hearing myself say it, and it’s the first time I’ve said it where I haven’t got emotional but, like, how do you imagine all of this?
“A wall of trees and mud and a torrent of water coming towards you on a sunny day. It’s hard to put your mind around.”
When Henare realised the water was rising she tried to help others, but found herself stuck grabbing a fence post as a torrent came through. She had to jump towards her dad to get onto the roof.
“I’m a good swimmer, but my old man was calling to me saying ‘just jump’ and I’m like ‘f*** you’. That’s the only time I’ve ever been scared, you know?”
Henare and her dad sat there for several hours before neighbours with tractors came through to rescue everyone on roofs on the block one by one.
Henare’s home is now covered in tarpaulins and other remedial works, but she says she’s confident the house will pass a moisture test.
“It’s a cool thing, you know. The council wants to let us stay in these homes if it’s possible. And they’re really helping us — follow-ups, follow ups, follow-ups.
“Without their help we’d have had to leave, because we don’t know what the f*** we’re doing.
“But with them, the house will slowly come together again, one by one. We’ve just got to try to hold the heat inside the house, but still collect it from the outside in the day.
“We’re not builders or anything, but my partner loves it so I’m pretty lucky.”
Henare says being uninsured has helped in some ways because “we couldn’t sit around and cry. We had to work to sleep”.
The support of the Wairoa community as well as the Red Cross and other organisations has been huge for her, and she wants to let everyone else know it.
“Without that, we would have been up s*** creek, all of us.
“The North Clyde neighbourhood support — what they have done has been just awesome.
“To those people, I say thank you, thank you.”
The business community in North Clyde is largely industrial, and a good source of jobs for Wairoa.
East Coast Lumber is now back, after a huge effort to clear its machinery out, but some garages remain shuttered.
ITM Wairoa, a part of the community for 72 years, is staring down the barrel of permanent closure.
The brothers who run it, Carey and Rob Gregory, are fighting and losing a daily battle with mud and dust.
More than $200,000 of destroyed equipment sits unable to be used in their worksheds, while even in the shop, the remnants of the flood are impossible to banish.
Sweep the dust out and it’s back almost immediately.
Deliveries for their workshop since the cyclone have been scarce and expensive, and so they’ve made a decision to see out their remaining orders rather than take on new ones, and see what the insurance landscape looks like once that happens.
Carey said he and Rob, 73 and 71, are wary and weary of how long it will take to get up and running again.
“We just looked at the mud and we were a bit like ‘s***, where do we even start?’,” Carey said.
“We can’t get it out, honestly. It’s just continuous, every day at the moment you find something new that is affected by it.
“We just haven’t got the energy any more — I mean it feels like it’s going to take 12 months and we’re at the three-month mark and we’re not seeing the light there yet.”
The business has been in the family since their father started it in 1951, and it would be a big loss for the town if it goes with them, Carey said.
Clearly, longevity is a point of pride in North Clyde, whether you’re a business or homeowner.
But big floods change things. Sylvia Bell is just about ready to leave Mackley St. Bola couldn’t make her leave but Gabrielle could.
She wasn’t around to see the torrent — her daughter evacuated her south to Flaxmere in advance — and she’s debating moving closer to her permanently.
“I wanted to stay here till my days.
“I’m taking a long time to think about it because I’ve enjoyed being here all these years.”
Bell is from the Whanganui River, about five minutes from the Bridge to Nowhere, and she has ancestral links to Te Hauke south of Hastings.
“I have places I can go, a lot of options. I’m okay.
“But one thing I know is that you can’t have your kids suffering for you, you’ve got to make it easier for them.”
With that, Bell gets up from her dining room table and heads back out into the warmth. She’ll be back again tomorrow, to pick that thought up again.
'Champions of Change' lead vital conversations to prevent family harm.