Eskdale resident 'furious' at Napier shooting and looting following cyclone

Saturday, 18 February 2023

Greg Miller is angry.

He owns the Valley D’Vine restaurant and Function Centre located on Linden East Winery in Eskdale, and over the past few days he’s sheltered and fed more than 20 flood-hit evacuees, locals who have lost their homes, and others their homes and their livelihoods in the destruction that was Cyclone Gabrielle.

The two-storey restaurant is okay, he says, the vineyard is still under six feet of water, and the new 1200sq metre barrel room and cellar door facility is “poked”.

However Miller isn’t angry about that. He’s horrified, furious even, at the news of a shooting incident in Napier and looting of shops and evacuated homes.

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“People in Napier need to stop fighting each other, they need to stop breaking into places to get shit because they haven’t got power,” he said.

“It’s brought out the worst in some people. I mean the whole of the Hawke’s Bay has been smashed, it’s not just this valley, Dartmoor Valley has gone, Puketapu has gone, it’s Wairoa and it’s Gizzy.”

Miller is well-known in the Esk Valley; he once hosted an event which raised close to $200,000 for Mike King’s I Am Hope mental health charity. However, he reckons he has only done what anyone would do in the same situation, and points to another local, Rikki Kihi, as being the real hero.

USAR at work in Esk Valley, Hawke's Bay, in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle.

Kihi had been in his jet boat picking up his pig dogs from a mate’s house, but ended up rescuing about 50 people, many from rooftops, Miller said.

“The guy’s a legend.”

Miller has only just been able to get out to view the damage in the valley and check on those who had stayed with him, as they muck in to salvage what they can.

“Mate, it looks like a war zone,” he said. Miller is planning to put on a community party in Bayview when circumstances allow.

“I’m going to smoke some meat, people can bring some beers and we’ll have a catch up.This community is unbelievable. They broken, but they’re not gone,” he said.

Cyclone Gabrielle is one of the worst storms to hit Aotearoa in living history, the MetService says.

“Like Cyclone Bola in 1988, Giselle that caused the Wahine disaster in 1968, and the unnamed cyclone of 1936, Gabrielle caused shocking impacts to the North Island,” MetService head of weather communications Lisa Murray said, in an overview of the cyclone that has dissipated to the east of the country.

“Few weather events are as terrifying or as powerful as a tropical cyclone,” she said.

“Gabrielle is one of the worst storms to hit Aotearoa New Zealand in living history.”