‘Staring down the barrel of another disaster’: A stream radically altered in the floods is an imminent threat
Wednesday, 11 February 2026
An East Cape settlement might suffer more damage in coming days unless the local council clears a stream bed that was raised about 1.5m by a devastating flood last month, locals say.
Several properties and buildings suffered major damage when a landslide occurred above Punaruku, near Te Araroa, in the early hours of January 22.
The future of several houses and buildings in the area is uncertain, with some being red-stickered, and others yellow-stickered.
The usually small Punaruku stream from the nearby hills became a deadly torrent after the landslide occurred. A family of seven in a house near the foot of the hills were forced onto their roof and had to be rescued by a helicopter.
Downstream of the family’s home was the Te Araroa Holiday Park, which bore the brunt of the destructive torrent.
Logs, rocks and silt swept through the holiday park and several of its buildings, forcing further evacuations.
The once beautiful holiday park, which included 15 cabins or flats and 110 campsites plus associated buildings, now looks like a battle zone, and what had been shaping up as the best summer of business for years came to an abrupt end, said owner Bill Martin.
Martin has, with the help of mates, spent the past 19 days trying to clear the mess.
Large piles of logs and silt are littered across the site, ready for removal.
A popular burger cafe at the campground, 35 Eat Street, opened by Nina McClutchie four years ago, was also inundated by silt and has been out of operation since the flood.
While Martin and McClutchie and friends and volunteers - including the army - have been flat out moving silt and clearing drains, it will be weeks if not months before either the holiday park or the cafe reopen.
Martin and McClutchie say the most pressing worry now revolves around the stream, which flows through the holiday park. Martin says the stream bed is about 1.5m higher than it used to be, due to the amount of silt and debris that came down in the landslide.
There is more heavy rain forecast to hit the area this weekend and MetService says there was moderate confidence that rainfall amounts may reach warning criteria in the area on Saturday. Martin says that unless the stream is cleared before then, they could be “back to square one”.
Martin said he called the Gisborne District Council last Thursday and spoke to a staff member about the forecast rain and the need to get the stream cleared.
“I told him something needed to be done quickly. He said someone would be up on Friday to have a look, but no-one came. So I rang him on Friday night and he said he needed a ‘river guy’ to come up and have a look and that couldn’t happen until today [Tuesday],” Martin said.
“If we get even a little bit of rain now, a lot of the work we’ve done, clearing drains and so on, they’ll all be filled with silt again. There’s heaps of silt upstream of us just waiting to come down,” he said.
He said he had not been impressed by the council or civil defence.
“It’s been really disappointing. They should have had a couple of diggers up here on Friday, or even Saturday, but they didn’t. They’re absolutely useless. Too slow. it might not be an emergency for them, but it is for us. It’s mind-boggling,” Martin said.
A council spokeswoman told Stuff on Tuesday that work clearing the stream was not likely to occur in the next few days.
“Council staff, including a river engineer, are on site today [Tuesday] assessing the stream and situation. A plan will be formulated once all the information is collated and this will be shared with the immediate community. That is unlikely to be within the next couple of days,” she said.
Martin said there were three houses on the other side of the stream that faced the same potential damage unless the stream bed was cleared in the next few days.
He said in some places, the stream bed was nearly level with the surrounding land.
“There’s probably about 400-500m of creek to be dug out. I’ve had a digger in there before. It’s amazing how much you can do with two diggers,” he said.
Martin said he expected to learn more when council staff visited him on Tuesday, and he was hopeful something could be started before rain began falling on Friday as forecast.
He said he was insured but since the flood he had had no income and was spending every hour clearing the land.
“We’re no different to the people hit by Gabrielle. You just keep going with what you have,” he said.
McClutchie said she was very concerned about the stream flooding again.
“How worried? On a scale from 1-10, I’m a 10,” she said.
“There are high nerves about the rain coming this weekend because if they don’t start doing something about this creek now, we’re staring down the barrel of another disaster,” McClutchie said.
“There’s a lot more to come off that hill and it’s not going to take much rain to make that happen. I still hear it [the slip] at night. There’s rocks falling all the time.”
McClutchie lost most of her belongings in the flood. She had been living in a cabin in the holiday park that was part of a block of six cabins that filled with silt and water.
The block is presently yellow-stickered, and she is living in another cabin that was not damaged.
“The water came up to the bathroom window. I lost the lot. I had contents insurance, but I’m weighing up the cost of excess versus the loss. To me it’s just material stuff,” she said.
“I’m doing my damnedest to get things back up and going. I’d like to say within the next four weeks, but it’s hard to know. Bill and I feel quite alienated at times but the support from Manaaki Matakāoa [a local hauora Māori service] has been incredible, much better than civil defence, which we haven’t even seen,” McClutchie said.