Some land unrecoverable after flooding

Friday, 4 July 2025

Some land damaged by the devastating rainfall last Friday will be unrecoverable, community leaders say.

Top of the South Rural Support Trust chair Richard Kempthorne said the damage was “daunting” for property owners, and would be for a long time to come.

“At the moment, people are pretty snowed under.”

Asked if some property would be unrecoverable, and if some property owners would never be able to return to what they had, Kempthorne said that was likely.

In some cases, the river was now flowing through their property.

“You can't change the river and if someone's had their land adjoining the river washed away, you can't replace it. Some of them have had orchards washed out and structures destroyed, and they're now closer to the river, so it's not safe to rebuild.

“There's just massive implications.”

The RST was contacting people who had major property damage, so that once there was help available to them, they had a spreadsheet of people that needed help, he said.

Tasman mayor Tim King said there were some people that would not be able to get back what they had.

“With all the will in the world, all the support, all the help, it's just not going to be possible. People in those circumstances, there's only really one way to put it, it’s heartbreaking.”

King said he had talked to one person who had lost 80% of their property. Their house was fine, but everything else was gone, and there were multiple similar stories in the region, he said.

Dovedale resident and dairy business consultant Brent Boyce described seeing acres of property by Stanley Brook now covered in strewn boulders, while up towards Tapawera, some paddocks had been turned into riverbeds.

Significant amounts of gravel had moved into a lot of places that didn't have gravel on them before, he observed.

As of Friday afternoon, 29 local roads were still closed, Nelson Tasman Civil Defence confirmed.

Across Nelson Tasman there were now 12 yellow stickered houses - two of which were in Nelson - and one red stickered home in Tasman.

Civil Defence was providing accommodation to 20 people at the moment, made up of a mixture of adults and children.

Regional public information manager Chris Choat said anyone returning home needed to be aware that standing water would be contaminated.

As the land was still incredibly saturated, there could be still some minor slips around roads, so people needed to be careful, he said.

Evan Baigent, who is involved in the Tapawera Emergency Committee, said many people in the area had been given road access in the past 24 hours.

Several farmers had bridges on their properties that had been washed out, and many farms had their boundary fences taken out completely, as well as losing feed and stock water supplies, and had to de-stock as a result.

Baigent said it would be in the next few days, when the adrenaline wore off, when locals would “start to really feel the stress”.

Karen Lindsay, who lives on the section where the Wai-iti river meets the Pigeon Valley Stream, has yet to ascertain the full damage on the property from the flood event, when water came up to the top of their fences, gauging 2m deep holes in their tracks.

While the event was scary, since then, Lindsay and her partner Rob Neame had been given immense support from the community - even from people they didn’t know.

“They’ve come into our house and stuck a meal in the stove for us,” she said.

“It just makes you thankful for where you live.”