Cyclone Gabrielle: In Hawke's Bay, a week of devastation that time forgot

Saturday, 18 February 2023

Footage taken from the air with the urban search and rescue team surveying Hawke's Bay after Cyclone Gabrielle.

Time has compressed in a week of unimaginable tragedy and loss so that those on the ground in Hawke’s Bay no longer know what day it is.

On Tuesday, the flood. After a night of torrential rain families woke to muddy driveways that were in some places just ankle deep. Minutes gave way to sheer terror. Babies, livestock, the elderly; walls of water came rushing through valleys, across suburban roads, into the hearts of people’s lives.

Into their homes.

Verity Johnson: “First the flooding, then the cyclone, then the ongoing post-Gabrielle devastation that just keeps punching and punching.”

Water is usually replenishing. It is part of us. In small units it is soft and refreshing.

The magnitude of nature transforms it into a force of unimaginable power. It is savage, untamable. It grabs an entire house in the Esk Valley and throws it 100 metres away. It flings a shipping container across a paddock in Waiohiki, smashes the concrete bases of the Brookfields Bridge away like Lego.

It does not care for us.

* Cyclone Gabrielle: Was the catastrophe at Esk Valley avoidable?

The flood-scarred banks of the Tutaekuri River, near Dartmoor.

* 'I can't overstate the scale of the task ahead': 4500 still out of contact after Cyclone Gabrielle

Sheena MCann and baby Charlie, 17 months, were among 200 people evacuated from Eskdale.

Floodwater isn’t like a swimming pool. It is thick and it is heavy. It is clogged with dirt and mud, trees, diggers, hay bales, sheep. Once it finds a weak spot in a bank it itches to be unleashed and it is hard to escape.

Teiaono Tiubeta looks towards the company he works for, flooded in Awatoto, Napier. His car is somewhere in there.

“We came over here to what we thought was one family,” says Rotorforce pilot Joe Faram, as the landscape slips below us from Bridge Pa towards the rural settlement of Puketapu on Saturday. It is a Saturday. “We came over the hill and everyone was on their roofs. It was chaos.”

Chris Barber hugs his brother Philip after the pair were reunited on the thick silt and mud that destroyed Chris's home when floodwaters swept through Esk Valley near Napier.

Water fell from the sky and the ranges and the Tutaekuri River burst, with the people of Puketapu caught in the middle. The same with the Esk River in Esk Valley, a narrower corridor which compressed the floodwaters into a seething snake. In Dartmoor and Pakowhai, Waiohiki and Awatoto, variations of the same; rivers merging, bursting their banks with little to no warning.

“We couldn’t see the colour where the sea began, it was just filth so far out.” says Urban Search and Rescue Operations Manager Chris Kennedy. He was in Japan during the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. This is how it looked.

Bill Eshleman with three small plastic bags filled with the few belongings he could save from his house.

He is tired. Around 90 of his workmates are still pulling wet, terrified people to safety. More than 166 live incidents are still underway. He has a family, two preschool children around the same age as Ivy Collins, 2, who floated away from her mothers arms and died here. “It is a nightmare.”

The people of Puketapu were airlifted to Hastings on Wednesday morning by New Zealand Defence force NH90s, 200 of them, dogs and cats in cages and toddlers running across the dry grass. “We don’t usually nap like this,” said mum Sheena McCann with her baby Charli, 17 months, outside the Hastings Aerodrome with her small child dozing on the ground in a backpack.

Volunteers help cleanup the Urupa at Tangoro Marae, 20 kilometres north of Napier after Cyclone Gabrielle.

Napier had been plunged into darkness since Tuesday, with State Highway 51 only open to essential travel as slips, downed bridges, and debri prevented movement along much of the roading network.

Evacuation centres welcomed hundreds while others, like Teiaono Tiubeta, survived on noodles and tinned mackeral. On Thursday morning, he gazed at the place his work had once been, Ziwi pet food factory in Awatoto. He’d recently moved from Tauranga with his partner for a job he was no longer sure existed. “I parked my car here because I thought it would be safe,” he said, in disbelief.

By now, adrenaline, shock, and exhaustion were echoed on the faces and in the tears of those who had escaped flood hit properties and were coming back to gather valuables, pets, and in some cases, brothers. “I thought you were dead,” Philip Barber said to his brother Chris, as they collapsed in a fierce embrace along an Esk Valley road. He had watched his house engulfed as the flood waters passed the roof, and had feared the worst.

But for many, the waiting continues. Social media pages are refreshed to nothing and calls go unanswered. Friends and loved ones remain unaccounted for, up to 1000 people in the Hawke’s Bay still uncontactable or cut off by Hawke’s Bay Civil Defence’s estimate. The death toll of Cyclone Gabrielle is nine, with grave fears held for ten of the missing.

When State Highway 2 between Napier and Hastings finally opens on Friday, a steady stream of traffic heads through to find hot water, coffee, food that hasn’t been rotting in the freezer for three days.

Bill Eshleman walked along the road carrying three yellow plastic bags full of papers. His shirt was splattered with mud. It was all he had. “Mine’s the mud house over there,” he said, pointing back to the Ngaruroro River.

He added, absently; “There were five of us and three dogs on the roof.”

On Saturday, an Urban Search and Rescue team took a moment out in Meeanee between assessing houses. They wore protective suits and boots, impenetrable to water. Homeowners sloshed past in shorts and jandals.

The water is beginning to stink. A sheep carcass lies against a nearby fence. Fertiliser, sewerage, chemicals, and pesticides are mixed into the mud, a hive for bacteria. As it dries, the dust will be another major health risk. “People really need to wait,” said Clem McGavock, a senior firefighter from Napier.

But for those who have been through one of the most traumatic events of their lives, those who have lost everything, what else is there to do? To sit around is to remember.

'Where do we start?' said Steve Tipu, a foster caregiver who escaped with his family of five across a raging Chesterhope Bridge before their house was destroyed.

“We have to go away and think about what we’ve seen and experienced, because it has impacted our senses. I’m not too sure what we’re going to do, to be honest. It’s all gone.”

One foot in front of the other. Another day. Another week. Mother nature has shown us what she can do.

Only human nature can control what happens next.