'It looks like a war-zone': Cable Bay residents lose 'big chunks' of hillside and road

Sunday, 21 August 2022

Bands of Nelson residents have grabbed their wheelbarrows and garden tools to help their neighbours living on Riverside.

Mike Biddiscombe was out checking on his neighbours in the Nelson Tasman region on Thursday afternoon, when his wife ran up with the dog: “The house is falling down the hill.”

After hours of heavy rain, a chunk of land between their house and their cosy, self-contained Airbnb called The Nest vacated its spot on the hillside, taking their outdoor stairs with it, which now rested some 50 metres down the hill.

Sarah and Mike Biddiscombe’s Cable Bay home and separate Airbnb, The Nest, have had the ground slip out from under them.

A nearby power pole was another victim of the slip, also leaving its post in favour of a spot of lesser altitude.

The houses remain, a credit to the deep, solid piles they rest on, but after local geotechnical engineer Mark Dawson took a look, they decided it was better safe than sorry.

A big chunk of the road at Cable Bay, Nelson, has slipped into the estuary, after heavy rain battered the Nelson-Tasman region earlier this week.

Sediment has been carried down the hill, and now lies across paddocks and roads.

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Richard Ussher says every culvert and bridge on the property has been destroyed by the sheer amount of water that came down off the hills.

Flooding at Cable Bay and Maori Pa Rd on Thursday afternoon.

The two buildings were red-stickered, and the family left to stay with friends.

“Theoretically the house isn’t going anywhere,” Biddiscombe said. “But we’ve lost a whole chunk of land.”

The region was hit by heavy rain on Thursday and Friday. Weather warnings were lifted by Saturday, but the region remains in a state of emergency, and residents have turned their minds to the cleanup. The forecast for Monday is for periods of rain from afternoon, clearing late evening.

Heavy rain has washed sediment down the hillside in Cable Bay, leaving roads caked in mud,

Cable Bay Adventure Park co-owner Richard Ussher had seen a fair amount of water through his property over the past few days.

The adventure park had recently upgraded a handful of culverts to manage double their capacity, but even this hadn’t been enough. “We needed four or five times that,” he said.

“Every bridge and culvert is destroyed.”

There had been “quite a lot of damage in the valleys”, he said, a massive amount of sediment left strewn across the paddocks and access to some areas blocked off because of slips.

The bulk of the damage had occurred on Thursday and Friday nights. Ussher crossed the river on Thursday, and although it was high, it wasn’t causing damage. Ten hours later, “it just reached a tipping point”.

Sandra Barker has lived in Cable Bay for 15 years. She said the road had flooded in places, and a big chunk, at a point about three-quarters around the bay, had fallen into the estuary.

“It looks like a war-zone,” she said.

Some of her neighbours left on Wednesday to stay with friends and family. One had constructed a makeshift wall to divert floodwaters before he left.

The way the community had banded together had been astonishing, she said.