Mum’s harrowing escape from floodwaters with four kids

Friday, 28 June 2024

Wairoa resident Ally Tipu recalls evacuating her family as the floodwaters rose.

Wairoa is a town brimming with stories of flooding homes, close shaves and fleeing for lives after the river turned back on itself and flooded more than 100 homes.

Streets are lined with wrecked furniture, toys and myriad drenched household items. It’s Gabrielle all over again, only in a different part of town.

On Thursday morning mum of four Ally Tipu stands on the sodden muddy carpet of her home on Apatu Street, the youngest of her four children, Pīpīwharauroa, 2, in her arms, crying as she describes the terror of rising waters and the terror she experienced as her car stopped dead as she fled.

The wrecked car still sits in the middle of the street, detritus gathered around its wheels.

Ally Tipu and her son Pīpīwharauroa, 2, had to evacuate their Wairoa home.

Tipu was asleep at home with Pīpīwharauroa, Rūaumoko, 4, Kiara, 7, and Elora, 8, at around 4am on Monday when her phone started going off.

“I was thinking who is this calling so early. It was my father. Thank goodness he rang. He lives down the road. He asked if we were all ok. I said ‘What do you mean?”. He said ‘Look outside, it’s flooding. You and the kids need to get out’,“ Tipu said.

Aftermath of flooding on Wairoa’s Apatu Street.

“I looked outside and it was significantly flooding. I thought ‘oh no, I’ve got to wake my babies up’. I was still half asleep. I woke my sons up and said said ‘it’s ok but we got to go’, then I woke up my daughters and told them ‘mum doesn’t have time, you got to quickly ram some clothes in a bag. We gotta go. We’re flooding’,” she said.

Damaged goods line the streets in Wairoa.

The kids were in hysterics. She gathered them in the lounge and told them it was OK and that they would be fine and that she would go and start the car, which was already partly submerged and get it on the road.

“I was lucky it started,” she said, through tears.

“I got it onto the road and ran back and told my children the water was rising too fast and flowing too fast and I was going to have to take them to the car one by one. I said ‘Don’t panic, Mum’s going to get you to the car, and it will be fine’,” she said.

“I was in the car and trying to drive away… there were sirens going off. It was hysterics, everybody was panicking. The water was coming into the car. The kids were screaming and scared,” she said.

Then the car stopped.

“It was terrifying. Then two people, my neighbours across the road, who i will forever be grateful for, they walked back after getting their kids to safety and helped me save my children,” Tipu said.

As the kids’ pictures and certificates from school dry on her dining table, Tipu looks around the living room and wonders how on earth she can get back to normal.

Friends are on hand, helping mop and salvage what they can, but the task seems immense.

“We’ll be OK. At least we’re all alright,” Tipu said.

The worst of the storm front had been forecast to pass by Friday, but the flooding had been “devastating”, Mayor Craig Little said.