Everywhere, strewn across the valleys and plains, there are apples. Red spheres line the roads and stud the drying mud. They are strung like beads on the fences, impaled on the barbed wire. As the flood waters rose, people waded through water up to the waists, then shoulders – and then swam through the torrent, past all the royal gala and braeburn. As the river rose through Max Robertson’s home, he pushed his father and two dogs on to a floating table, and tried to crack a joke: “I said: look Dad, we can go apple bobbing.”
When rivers burst their banks and sent Cyclone Gabrielle’s flood waters sweeping through Hawke’s Bay, they washed over hundreds of hectares of orchards, stripping the fruit from the trees and propelling it across the valleys.
Washing away with them are the livelihoods of many farmers and orchardists, lost alongside homes, belongings and at least nine lives. Now, surviving communities are gathering to try to pick up the pieces. With relief efforts under way nationally, emergency services are stretched thin, leaving some frustrated that more support has not arrived. In small towns and valleys, residents are gathering to dig out the mud, clear out houses and guard their homes from looters – and say they are seeing the best and worst humanity has to offer. The death toll climbed to 11 on Sunday.
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On a street in Puketapu, nurse Julia Ebbett and doctor Penny Henley are digging some bandages out of the back of a ute. They are gradually making their way up and down the valley where they live, checking on people, and helping where they can. At least one woman in this small community has been confirmed dead, drowned by flood waters in the roof cavity of her home.
“About 4.30 in the morning I woke up, and I could just hear rumbling,” says Ebbett, who lives on the hillside. “I said to my husband, that’s water … the bridges have gone, and the valley’s filling with water.”
Upstream, fuelled by 175.8mm of rain, landslides of mud and enormous hunks of forest debris, the Tūtaekurī river had swollen into a fury. Weaving its way towards the valley, hemmed in by the hills and narrower gorges, it had built to an enormous force, knocking out bridges and carving into the hillsides. Upstream, one road overlooking the riverbed has been sliced in half by the force of the water hitting as it rounded a corner – 10 metres above where the river’s surface now lies. When that water reached the open plains of Dartmoor Valley, it spilled out of its banks, filling up the valley like a hosepipe funnelling into a shallow bowl.
When daylight came, Ebbett says, “I looked across at our neighbours and I could just see an island of sheep, and the rest was just like a river. The houses opposite us were just completely covered with water.”
Her neighbour was with her five-year-old son, daughter and dog up a tree, where they had clung through the night. “She had to let one of her dogs go, because her kid went underwater,” Ebbett says. “They put a call out to the rescue services at around five o’clock and she was basically waiting there for five hours in the tree – she had cuts all down her legs, bruised from here downward,” she says, gesturing to her waist.
In those early morning hours, with helicopters still hampered by high winds, many of the rescue parties were made up of local people, who waded through silt and chest-high water to help those stranded. Now, as emergency responders continue to look for bodies and are stretched thin with deliveries of essential supplies, much of the early cleanup is again falling to local residents – digging out one another’s homes, sharing water, carrying donation boxes in from neighbouring towns.
“People are feeling a bit neglected,” says Henley. “They’re getting angry and upset.”
On the town’s main street, a group drag ruined furniture and mattresses from a home to dump outside. A truck from Silver Ferns Farms arrives, full of donated short rib beef burgers. One man has driven in with a barbecue on his truck, and is handing out sausages to passersby.
Across the road, however, a community meeting is taking place on the main street: after four homes were hit by looters last night, tensions are running high. As the meeting concludes, the town decides to construct roadblocks on the main route coming in and out of the town, using trucks and forklifted concrete blocks over the road.
“Everyone’s pretty gutted. We’re going through enough,” says Nigel Parkinson, who has volunteered to man the roadblock that evening. “The thought that we have to do roadblocks at night to actually hold on to our worldly goods, which have already been destroyed – we’re digging through the mud trying to find shit – it’s terrible,” he says.
“The police – they’re still looking for people that are missing. They’re trying to find people. So we know that they’re doing everything they can, but they’re stretched.”
In a ruined flat next to the local mechanic’s workshop, the water has stained Paul Shann’s walls brown-grey. He points out the high-water mark – a few centimetres above his six-foot frame. He escaped to higher ground before the waters got too high.
“I went out to check a few things, next thing the water’s up to testicle height. I said well, that’s my limit – I’m out of here,” Shann says. Clad only in board shorts and a large straw hat, he says almost everything in his flat has been destroyed by the waters. A few salvaged belongings and tools are drying outside. Next to them, rubbish burns in a metal drum.
Shann pulls a pitchfork out of the pile of remaining tools – and says he’s been carrying it with him, when he can’t sleep at night, walking through the town. “I carry this,” he says. “It may not be pretty. It may not be legal. But if there’s looters about? Yeah, I’m not going to be standing here with a walking stick.”
Henley says: “There are these others – presumably displaced and dispossessed, or general ratbags coming into the community, and they’re not coming to help.” Some are rubberneckers, others have attempted to enter properties or loot empty houses. Police in the region have already made a number of arrests for looting. “If they’re not coming to help, we don’t want them at the moment,” Henley says. “They’re likely to meet some aggro.”
Outside the fire and emergency station, a woman is responding to those who come for assistance. She listens to the news that looters have been doing the rounds. “Well, you get angels and assholes in times like this,” she says.
“That’s what I like to say: some assholes, but also angels.”
