Banks Peninsula locals living with dread as floods become ‘when, not if’

Tuesday, 19 May 2026

A Little River store owner says he’s heard visitors complain about how the town is looking, just over two months after the flood.

With New Zealand experiencing a storm on average every eight days, thousands of properties in coastal inundation and flood zones could become uninsurable. Our new series explores the impacts of relentless weather events on families and communities, and asks for how much longer insurance will be available and how the Government is planning to respond.

Last year, an unprecedented 48-hour deluge cut much of Banks Peninsula off from Christchurch.

A publican in Little River, a picturesque little town on State Highway 75, told RNZ it was so bad, businesses on the main road flooded for the first time in decades.

This February, it happened again.

The Christchurch City Council ended up triggering a local state of emergency for Banks Peninsula, after it got five months’ worth of rain in just 35 hours.

It had a lingering impact across two communities. Council staff undertook 15 rapid assessments on buildings believed to be damaged after the floods, five in Little River, and 10 in Wainui.

Cameron Gordon estimates they are still about five weeks from being able to reopen in full.

As of May, one property in Little River still had a red placard in place, meaning it was unsafe to enter or occupy. One had a yellow placard while another had been removed, and two white placards remained. Around Wainui, three properties were red-stickered, and one yellow-stickered.

‘If this happens again, the insurers are probably going to not be smiling’

Back in February, the Little River Café & Store was inundated, and insurance assessors told owner Cameron Gordon the interior would need a complete rebuild.

Treading Water explores the impacts of relentless weather events on families and communities.

This progressed more slowly than expected, and he estimates they’re still five weeks away from a full reopening. In the meantime, they’ve stayed afloat by operating the café out of their nearby restaurant.

But for Gordon, rain warnings now made him anxious – and thinking about the future left him “genuinely quite nervous”.

If he didn’t have three children, he’d consider leaving.

“They’ve got school, they’ve got their friends, they’ve got their lives out here. So it’s not easy for us to just jump out and do something else,” he said. “[But we have] definitely thought about it.

Gordon says they’ve been able to operate their store out of their café area, and their café out of a nearby restaurant.

“There are places I’d rather be that don’t experience this all the time, but that’s how it is. It’s home for us now, we’ve been here 20 years.”

This year’s flood also made him worry about Little River’s long-term prognosis.

“Any serious event again down here will have a pretty massive implication, I think, on the future out here for families and businesses,” he said.

The Little River Café & Store flooded extensively earlier this year.

“We hire 30 to 40 locals at any one time. All the kids grow up working at the café, so that would be gone for them as well. It’s kind of a central hub that we’d like to keep there ideally. But I feel like if this happens again, the insurers are probably going to not be smiling when they come and see me.”

Gordon had adopted a relatively stoic, if apprehensive, position on the prospect of further floods.

“If it happens, it happens. I can’t do anything about it. But at the same time, it’s not a great place to be looking at the forecast and seeing when it’s going to happen again – because it really is a when, not if situation.”

There was another unknown he was grappling with too: whether business would eventually return to the once-thriving tourist stop.

“It’s tough now because it's not looking that great, with the containers outside the back door of the shop, and the shop’s dark, and there’s broken stuff and mud piles everywhere still… [I have] had quite a few comments from people coming through, and they’ve been disappointed in how the town looks.

“I just hope that it does bounce back to where we were, because we were going really, really well,” he said. “To have it stopped and people not be coming out for months on end is not ideal. But at the same time, we can’t do anything about it except try and open up bigger and better.”

Rain on the roof can ‘make them really uncomfortable’

Julia Becker, a professor at Massey University’s Joint Centre for Disaster Research, said people living in flood zones can suffer mental health impacts like those seen after the Canterbury earthquakes.

“You hear people talking about when they see bad weather coming again, or when they hear rain on the roof, for example, some of those things start to make them feel really uncomfortable.

“There’s definitely an immediate kind of distress that people can get from knowing that there might be more bad weather coming,” she said. “You also saw that in the Canterbury earthquake sequence.”

Early on, when there were frequent aftershocks, people’s discomfort and distress levels were high. These feelings fell away over time for many.

“But every time there was a resurgence in the aftershocks … you could see a spike in people's anxiety.”

For communities, Becker said the aftermath often came in two waves.

“We often see immediately afterwards that people do rally together and work together to try and fix some of the impacts, fix some of the damage, clean up properties,” she said. But over time, damage, closures, and disruptions could start to weigh on people.

“They might not be able to get to work very easily or maybe go to school… In the wider community sense, I think that’s when it becomes quite tough for people because their routines are disrupted, and they just really want to get their lives back on track and back to normal.”

For those struggling, reaching out to their social network could help, as could planning what to do as a community if the same thing happened again. Support from agencies could help too, like guidance for people grappling with insurance claims.

Navigating an uncertain future was now the difficult reality for communities across Aotearoa.

“[It is] really difficult because people are tied to areas, and people do have friends and family and neighbours that live in those areas as well. I think some of the conversations about managed retreat are not really that straightforward,” Becker said.

“It’s not as simple as saying, right, you’re in a bad area, we're going to move you out. I think it’s a much longer conversation about how and when and what that might look like.”