Our survival depends on us living with nature, and post-cyclone where we rebuild and where we do not is the main issue to address now
Opinion: I visited Hawkes Bay last week and saw a snapshot of the impacts of the cyclone that wreaked such a path of destruction last month.
There had been a lot of work done, but the small fraction we saw simply reinforced the scale of what lies ahead.
I remember a landscape architect telling me after the earthquakes: "You can pipe it, you can divert it, you can cover it up, but the memory of the stream remains in the land."
I saw that played out in the places we visited.
Houses that had been built in idyllic settings found that the underlying stream, which had been diverted with stopbanks along the river after the Napier earthquake, became a natural path for the river to follow when it had nowhere else to go.
The sheer force of the water picked up anything in its way – cars and equipment, we even saw a shed in a field where it did not belong, not to mention the slash and the riparian trees, which wedged behind bridges causing debris-laden torrents of water to pour through properties.
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The visit brought back memories of what it was like for us after the Canterbury earthquakes.
Every emotion that people have experienced is a natural human response to what was a life-threatening event.
The adrenaline-fuelled response that gets us out of harm’s way is soon replaced with a deep-seated anger that questions how this could happen.
What did decision-makers do or not do that meant my place flooded? Why didn’t we get an earlier warning? Who was responsible?
And, of course, people want to know what’s going to happen now. There is nothing like uncertainty to heighten our anxiety.
We know that in our part of the world. It was the same for us.
The questions that look back for answers about land-use zoning, forestry practices, flood defences, these will all need to be answered in time. But they don’t have to be answered straight away. It’s the tie to what happens next that is the issue. Where we rebuild and where we do not.
We were reminded time and again of the power of nature, and the adage that cautions us not to fight it.
As Jacques-Yves Cousteau said: “For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realise that, in order to survive, he must protect it.”
Our survival depends on us living with nature and, in this case, living with water.
I was more than a little worried that Westport has instead had to look to building flood defences without the buffer the retreat would have given. But the risks that come with overtopping or breach don’t seem to have been factored in. New Orleans shows us what would happen.
This is why I want to warn people to be careful what they wish for.
Flood defences can give us a false sense of security. They are not infallible, and they can and do fail.
I remember visiting New Orleans several years after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, and I was shocked at the extent of the damage. I also didn’t realise how vulnerable New Orleans was. When the levees broke, it filled up like an empty swimming pool, and the water had nowhere to go.
There are big decisions to make, but there isn’t a single story in each region that explained what happened, so we should not expect that there will be a single recovery story either.
Catchment-by-catchment, we need to understand what the vulnerabilities are. We cannot afford to re-entrench them, as we have clearly done in the past. The use of steep erodible soils for pasture and production forestry is a case in point.
I watched the Sunday programme three weeks ago and saw a story that focused on the recent floods and contrasted it with what had happened in Westport two years ago.
It seems wrong, watching this in retrospect, that a decision to retreat from the worst and repeatedly affected flood-prone areas was not taken. It was upsetting to listen to a homeowner explaining how she had no option but to rebuild where she had already been flooded twice, knowing her home will flood again.
The point was made that it is never any less expensive to retreat from an area than it is in the immediate aftermath of a disaster when available insurance funds can be put towards to the cost of retreat. As I said in my last column, the difference still has to be funded.
I was more than a little worried that Westport has instead had to look to building flood defences without the buffer the retreat would have given. But the risks that come with overtopping or breach don’t seem to have been factored in. New Orleans shows us what would happen.
And so do Waiohiki and Pakowhai in Hawkes Bay where flood waters got trapped behind the stopbanks that encircled them. Is that really a natural disaster or was it man-made?
And did the community between the rivers know the level of risk they were living with?
I know we use the phrase ‘build back better’, but let’s not go back. Let’s build better together.
