Onto the roof as Shaggery Creek, near Motueka, becomes a torrent

Wednesday, 21 February 2018

Residents beside Shaggery Creek were swamped on Tuesday by ex-Tropical Cyclone Gita's heavy rain.

The Rombouts family readied themselves on Tuesday evening to climb to a tent on the hill behind their Brooklyn home as the usually docile Shaggery Creek became a torrent, carrying a huge debris load in its life-threatening flow including four cars.

That creek also split and carved itself a new passage along Shaggery Rd itself as it barrelled towards the Motueka River, sweeping water, sand and debris into the homes of the Rombouts' two tenants on the opposite side the waterway. One of those tenants, Fran Deech, was taken to safety by her neighbour, Ian Ferne, as the flood tore through her home and lovingly tendered garden.

The creek at the corner of Shaggery Rd and Motueka River West Bank Road rages on Tuesday during the storm.

The other tenants, a couple, were forced to clamber onto the roof of their cottage and await rescue by the authorities as ex-Tropical Cyclone Gita hit the Nelson-Tasman region.

* 'No reason' to call state of emergency earlier in Tasman, as ex-cyclone Gita hit

Lyn Rambouts inspects the damage to one of her tenant's cottages. The couple who lived there climbed on the roof to await rescue.

* Golden Bay cut off**

Lyn Rombouts and her family, along with Ferne, were devastated they could not reach the duo.

'I ran down and I thought: 'Jeez, there's just so much floating around,' Ferne said, referring to the water and debris flowing through their property. 'If you got caught up in it, you'd be goneburger.'

Rombouts said she had a feeling of powerlessness and helplessness. She was also worried for her own family as the creek neared their home while the flooding and debris had blocked the road exit.

Fortunately, the water stopped rising before it breached the house. The family, including the children who were already clad in plastic council rubbish bags, did not have to climb up to the tent they had pitched earlier.

As the water receded on Wednesday, the devastation was obvious and heartbreaking but the Rombouts were counting themselves lucky their home was not flooded and that the disaster unfolded in daylight so they could react.

Rombouts said she believed the ground around her property was now a metre higher, raised up by thick layer of silt that was deposited by the raging waterway in the space of about an hour on Tuesday evening.

'It's like the whole valley's come down and we're now a metre higher or nearly two metres higher,' she said. 'The river's just brought the land down. It's like a volcano has flooded us with lava.'

Of course, that silt has smothered the renowned garden that hosted a wedding celebration just a few days earlier.

'It's a meadow and has 1000 daffodils in the spring, it's amazing,' Rombouts said with tears in her eyes. 'It's now six foot under sand.'

Deech lifted as many belongings as she could from the floor of her cottage before she left with Ferne.

'I threw up probably 80 per cent of the things. I missed precious things like the box of family photos,' she said pointing to a soggy box on the silt-covered deck.

'Hopefully, my piano will be all right; I don't know if a piano can survive that sort of treatment.'

The garden definitely did not survive the powerful onslaught of the water that swept her white Nissan Pulsar into the Shaggery – one of the four cars the Rombouts spotted tearing down the waterway before slamming into and over the Motueka River West Bank Rd bridge.

'I had the most amazing winter garden that was going to feed me through the winter,' Deech said.

She also grew medicinal herbs. None can be seen in the silt-covered yard.

The new branch of the creek still runs down Shaggery Rd before it crosses back into the original bed.

Ferne said the creek had changed.

'What was the Shaggery is like a little trickle now and there's two new forks so it runs down the flat area in front of our house and comes out onto the road.'

All of the members of the tight-knit community who gathered on Wednesday to survey the damage said they believed the debris, much of it logs, aggravated the flooding.

'It feels like 18 logging trailers have just dumped their cargo there,' Rombouts said. 'Some of this is natural trees, of course, and this is a natural disaster. However, every bend in the river got dammed up by these unyielding logs – they've piled up, criss-crossed and then every other little thing just packs in and then the river split and that's the devastation.'

If it had carved its own way, it might have flooded some of the meadow but stayed in its channel rather than splitting and charging through the property, she said.

Ferne said he believed a digger would be needed to return the creek to its usual course. The flooding on Tuesday evening was the worst he'd seen since he bought his property in 2003, he said.