FLOOD 2015: The Whanganui River at the weekend, with the "nui" clearly in evidence.PHOTO/FILE
THE ONGOING fascinating debate being waged on the Chronicle letters page as to the original meaning and/or spelling of the city's name has thrown up a picaresque host of competing alternatives.
However, there's been one commonality in the debate - little dispute about the "nui" syllable denoting big, or long ... or, perhaps, both.
And didn't the river deliver undisputable "nui"!
The Whanganui is the longest navigable river in the country. I'm not sure if the figures are out, but I'd also lay a few bob that for a few days it was also the biggest by volumetric flow.
For those few days, by New Zealand standards, it was a mighty Mississippi. And if you were able to get down close to the riverbank when it was still at full flood on the Sunday, you were left in no doubt as to its astounding mass and power.
For a close-up look-see, I wandered down to the western end of Kowhai Park.
The park, Anzac Parade and the adjoining properties were all one lake out to the east. While the Parade between Georgetti and City Bridge wasn't under water (although blocked by several big slips from the Shakespeare Cliff), the adjacent riverside footpath certainly was.
So nowhere to go except stand and watch the great pluvial express surge by. Along for the ride were trainloads of uprooted and dead trees and general detritus. And, for a while there, a pair of ducks enjoyed a zippy surf ride as they nonchalantly rode some flotsam for a couple of hundred metres at a pace a windsurfer would have been quite happy with.
I'm not sure if it was an optical illusion, but the river actually seemed to be in a crowned shape as the way a road is crowned - slightly mounded for surface water to drain to the sides. It was as if the huge volume of water was saying, "We're ocean bound big-time, brother, and we're not going to waste time en route by smoothing ourselves out to a nice even level as water's meant to do."
In fact, the velocity in the main channel was such that a substantial channel of sidewash was bizarrely being sucked back upriver on the outside of the river bend in a Venturi effect.
Various reports were rating the flood as the biggest ever, or the biggest in 85 years, but I struggled to find the original sources for these figures. And it seemed to depend on whether you were talking about water levels at Pipiriki or at City Bridge.
Photographic records up at the Alexander Library show the 1904 and 1940 floods as being the other biggies, with snaps of small boats sailing down Taupo Quay and the like.
A friend reported the waters lapping up around the Embassy theatre in the weekend, which is what an old-timer recollects when he witnessed the 1940 flood - and from the photographs, the 1904 levels seem similar. Not to deny climate change (when has it ever not!), but salutary to remember that current extreme weather events are not necessarily unprecedented.
I see at least one reader rueing the lack of local radio information and reliance on social media, which isn't much cop if the broadband is down. I, too, twirled the dial in vain, but had to wait for National Radio to finally deliver on local road closures.
A few months ago I noted how "local" radio seemed to consist of playlists spat out in Cincinnati or somesuch. True to form, Bob Seger and his Silver Bullet Band blithely kept us all rockin' while, in the real world, Old Man River rolled.
A slightly unreal sensation to be up on the side of Bastia Hill (as I am) looking down at the forlorn inundated houses on the Parade, literally almost just a stone's throw away.
What can one say, except it was maybe ironic that it all happened on the cusp of the shortest day. Theoretically, at least, spring beckons - although for the devastated householders it must be a very, very faint beckoning indeed.
NOTE: Huge ups to all the Civil Defence and local authority workers - valiant work in vexing conditions.
Frank Greenall has a master's degree in adult literacy and managed Far North Adult Literacy before moving to Wanganui.