Living in a flood zone: after dramatic escapes in the night, residents look to the future
Wednesday, 22 April 2026
After a terrifying night of rising water and narrow escapes, Emerson St residents are leaning on each other: and wondering what the future holds for their homes and their street.
When asked how she is holding up, Sonja Steinmetz wells up a little.
“The last two days, I’ve been holding it in, but today when I talk to someone, the emotional weight is hitting me.”
Steinmetz woke on Monday to hear bins bumping against the side of her house near the bottom of Berhampore’s Emerson St.
When she realised how fast the water was rising, she and husband Will Johnson grabbed a nappy bag, an iPad and their wedding rings, and fled out the back with their children.
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“Will was holding the two-year-old, I didn’t have shoes on. It was pitch black. I couldn’t see. But your body just knows - you just do it.”
The family scrambled over a fence and crawled up a slippery bank to the house behind theirs. It was 4am, but their neighbours, relative strangers, offered them hot drinks, dry clothes and comfort.
The kindness has carried on through the aftermath, with the community offering help and support.
“We are blessed and lucky to have so many angels around us.”
But on Wednesday, as family members sorted through the sodden debris of her home, Steinmetz pointed out that while she’d had plenty of offers of help, she was unable to tackle the mess without the proper equipment: masks and gloves, a gap she felt could be addressed by an emergency response team.
Emerson St is considered vulnerable to flooding, the dark blue shading on Wellington City Council’s Flood Zone map indicating that waters could rise more than a metre in the event of severe storms.
The street isn’t an outlier: zooming out reveals a city that looks more like a network of rivers, and official figures show that 73,000 residential buildings, housing 200,000 people, are vulnerable.
The flood water that pooled at the bottom of Emerson St on Monday morning reached a depth of well over two metres in the home of Steinmetz’s 87-year-old neighbour, whose own dramatic escape saw her seek shelter in a gap in her wardrobe as the waters rose.
This neighbour was front and centre of Bibi Hawkes’ mind when she looked out the window in the wee hours.
“I'm like, ‘oh my God’,” said Hawkes, who lives opposite Steinmetz, in the upstairs flat of a two-storey home. “I thought, this is where our 87-year- neighbour lives, and we can’t get to her.”
Hawkes called 111 and watched as cars bobbed along the street, their lights flickering on as their electrics short-circuited.
Then, a knock at the door: her tenants, a family of four who lived downstairs, came inside, dripping wet and in shock.
Hawkes had just ushered them inside when she heard shouting: her next door neighbour Amita Flores was calling for help.
A nurse who works odd hours, Flores was already awake when she opened the front door to water, rising so quickly she knew she was in trouble.
“I said to myself, ‘you will die inside’.”
As water rose through the floor, Flores and her flatmate called 111, and shouted through the living room window, hoping the Hawkes would hear them.
“I shouted ‘Andrew, Andrew, help us, help us’,” Flores said.
But when the furniture in the room began to float, Flores knew they had to move.
“We said, we have to get out otherwise we will die inside.”
With her dog tucked under her arm, Flores and her flatmate waded to the back door, forced their way outside and struggled through chest-deep water to clamber up the steep bank behind the property.
They huddled in the pouring rain, holding onto the long grass, until Andrew Hawkes made his way down to help them.
Bibi Hawkes described her husband as “action man”.
“I married him for this eventuality … if it’s Armageddon, we'll have water and electricity in the cave thanks to him.”
The couple believe in pitching in and helping, and they love their community. And that’s why they plan to stay, Hawkes said.
“We all get on, our kids play together, and it's wonderful. This is how the world should actually be, right? So no, we're not going anywhere.”
She had concerns about the street’s storm water drains, and their maintenance. But she also had a degree of fatalism.
“If the last 10 years of weather has taught us anything, now that it's happened once, it will happen again.”
Flores said as she waded through the chilly water, she’d thought about her elderly mother in the Philippines.
“What if I will die, and my mum will never see me again?”
It was that thought that gave her pause about sticking round.
“I really want to stay because we like this community but the fear of another big flood, that's quite scary: just imagine going through this again.”
At the top of the street, Neal Jenkins recalled waking when the dog jumped on his bed.
Getting up, he saw water coming through the back door. Moments later, it was rising through the floor.
He tucked the dog and his 3-year-old under his arms, and with his 6-year-old on his heels, headed upstairs to call emergency services.
It’s all a bit of a blur, but Jenkins does remember the cascade of water, “like a tsunami”, flowing into his garden from the tree-clad block behind the property.
His partner, Tahni Daniels, was in Sydney and woke to messages. She got home as soon as she could.
The damage didn’t seem quite real until she stepped into the home and saw the damage, including her ruined hair salon, which she has spent six years building.
“It's been the perfect business, so successful: I thought I had a perfect life.”
She was grateful for her neighbours, who had pitched in to support the family, Daniels said.
“That's the annoying thing. We kind of want leave now because of this, but then, we've got the most incredible community.
“I don't know, what do you do? We’ll just start again I guess.”