There was nowhere to go when Cyclone Gabrielle's waters hit the Hawkes Bay town of Waipawa - residents couldn't flee to the ranges or the beach.
Ngavii Pekapo started his day in Waipawa cleaning up after his dog. He ended it with more than that to clean up.
"I had a shovel and was picking up all my dog’s shit all over the place and I could hear this huge noise, it was deafening, this huge noise. I stopped and looked at the trees. My neighbour had been down for a walk and she looked all excited. I said, 'where have you been?' She said, 'I’ve just been down to look at the river.' I said, 'is that the noise I can hear,' and she said, 'yes.'
"So down I went to have a look. I watched it build, I watched it every hour. I’ve got a big shed down the bottom of the road where I live. It’s got some very expensive gear, so I was down there ripping all of that stuff out of there. I had to leave a lot behind, hoping it wasn’t going to come up. It was about a foot away from covering it, and then it receded. I couldn’t believe it."
But the excitement turned into something else. Pekapo lives in Waipawa in Central Hawke's Bay and hasn't seen anything like it in 70 years.
"I’ve been here 70 years and I’ve never, ever, ever, seen that. You could just about reach over the bridge and touch the water coming underneath it. It was coming in like a rough sea, like a three-metre swell. It was fucken huge."
Others in the area weren't as lucky, with half the town inundated after the Waipawa breached its banks. More rain is expected.
"We’re sitting here waiting because we’re expecting another 400 mm of rain. The railway bridges have been scoured out, there won’t be trains here for a while. The stop-banks that were put up years ago, they are all gouged out. They were all breached.
"Down here on the football fields there’s just shingle everywhere. All that shingle is from where the water breached the stop banks. It breached the stop-banks and then it came into town. It came into a transport yard up here in the middle of town, there was an outfit that stored all the building timber and that. They lost tanks, those big plastic tanks. Timber just getting taken down the river," Pekapo said.
"It went through the eastern side of Waipawa, it just flooded it, it just completely flooded it. That’s because it breached the banks, otherwise we would have been as good as gold. So they evacuated all the eastern side of Waipawa. Houses are underwater. Houses on the eastern side are underwater. Half the town was flooded and they’re in the town hall now. My son-in-law is grabbing mattresses from Te Aute College.
"You couldn’t get to Hastings from Waipawa. You couldn’t get to Waipawa from Hastings. Waipawa and Waipukurau, they took a battering, they took a hell of battering. If this 400mm comes that’s another battering. It’s just going to flood the place again."
The coast out from Waipawa was lashed by high seas
"We went and moved the caravan the other day, we had to because we were expecting between four and 7-metre swells. That arrived in the morning, so I’m glad I got that out. Everyone’s usually at the beach this time of year. We’re usually out there but we had those rains in the last three weeks. It’s the worst summer we’ve ever had.
"It's just become a quagmire," he said.
"The roads were blocked everywhere, going out of town, you couldn’t go to the ranges because the roads were blocked, you couldn’t go to the beach because the roads were blocked in three different places, trees were blown down. It was just chaos, absolute chaos."
He said the area hadn't been affected by the debris from forestry harvesting like other areas but there were huge logs coming down the rivers.
"That's our biggest worry, those hitting the pillars of the bridges and knocking the bridges out. Up in Hastings I heard that the Tutaekuri (river) wiped out the Fernhill bridge and the Brookfield bridge. They’re old bridges. That would have been caused by that rubbish (slash)."
The biggest risk was more rain falling in the ranges.
"It takes 17 hours to get from the mountains down to here. It’s still coming."
