Cyclone Gabrielle: Waipawa River floodwaters leave bizarre landscape

Near Waipawa, Ron Hape and the whiteware graveyard that has been strewn around by the river breakout south of here. Photo / RNZ / Phil Pennington

RNZ

Ron Hape is doing a pied piper with his ATV around a disused piggery that still stands, old and faded but not knocked over, in the face of a breakout by the Waipawa River during Cyclone Gabrielle.

The buildings stood up to the flow last Tuesday.

Not Pourerere Road though - it was sliced in two about 5km east of Waipawa, just another new obstacle among the many thousands now facing locals.

Hape led two utes, then a third, off to where one end of the tar seal had been abruptly cut, onto the gravel by the piggery. And then in a short loop around the back and on to the other road’s end.

“He just didn’t know where the track was, so I showed him,” Hape said of one of them.

The gravel extends north as far as you can see, regularly dotted with bright, white, old cookers and washing machines, as if the river ran through a Noel Leeming.

Instead, it had washed them out from an informal dump by the piggery and, oddly, lots of, mostly, children’s bicycles.

“It’s washed out, but you can get your car round here,” Hape told me, indicating the tyre-dampened track.

Otherwise, it would be a 40-plus kilometre detour, he said.

Hape came for a look.

Normally, he would be working on a Napier forestry crew that was contracted to Pan Pac. But not at the moment.

Pourerere Rod, east of Waipawa, has been split by a breakout of the river. Photo / RNZ/ Phil Pennington

“There’s not a lot of access to our forests. Obviously, all the roads [are] washed out.

“So we’ve sort of gotta venture out of town, fill in a bit of time til Pan Pac sort out all their machinery, get the mill up and running. So, it might be a couple of months or could be longer or shorter.

“We just don’t know.”

Meanwhile, it looked like there was work in the South Island.

Why so many kids' bikes were tangled in the flood detritus seems a strange puzzle Photo / RNZ / Phil Pennington

“We might just venture off down there ... come back when Pan Pac’s ready,” Hape said.

Tim Cullwick made it past the piggery without a guide, on his way back home to Tamumu farm.

Whole farms roundabout were still “heavily” underwater, he said out the driver’s side.

“This is just the beginning,” he gestured at the shingle strewn out from off to the south where the stopbank breached.

“The properties in behind it just down on the way [north], they’ve lost their pump sheds and pumps as well, and [stock] buildings ... and silage.

“Thousands of bales of silage must have floated down the river.”

To the north, 15km away, the Waipawa breakout had put the rich flats near Te Aute College underwater, Cullwick said.

His own farm was now riven with slips.

Tim Cullwick takes the piggery detour. Photo / RNZ / Phil Pennington

He and staff saved 100 sheep on the night of the storm, swimming some out, or taking them nine at a time on a buggy. They reckon they lost another 98 of their 12,000 stocking numbers.

“But until we do our reconciliation, we won’t know [for sure],” Cullwick said.

“We just try to keep our pecker up ... and pick one thing off at a time.”

Hape is equally phlegmatic. “I didn’t think it was going to be this bad.

“But oh well, here we are.”

He is a logger though, not a roadworker, and soon he blurts back off up the road.

- RNZ