On the morning of Feb. 14, after Cyclone Gabrielle struck the North Island of New Zealand, Ashley Church woke up to see backyards and roads completely flooded.
Miraculously, his own house was untouched, just mere metres away from the flood waters.
“I walked down the road; all of the houses there were flooded except ours—ours wasn’t touched. If people had cars in the driveway, they were submerged underwater,” Church told The Epoch Times.
“But that was all we knew.”
With the power cut off and the roads completely flooded, Church’s community in Whirinaki Beach, Hawke’s Bay, had no way of receiving information.
“There was lots of people walking around wondering what was happening. We had no power, no internet, no water,” he said.
“We couldn’t receive messages so we had no idea what was going on.”
Only after the flood waters receded the next day was Church and the community able to truly take stock of what the weather event had done.
It was like a tsunami, but if the water came from the hills instead of the sea, Church said.
“So all the water, millions and millions of litres of water powered down the Esk valley, which is like a funnel, and just destroyed everything on its path,” he said.
“Houses were wiped out—massive, great logs had just cut straight through them. Cars were on their roofs; there was a layer of silt about three or four feet deep. And that was just where we were.”
Church heard that the situation further up the Esk Valley had been even worse.
“It was like a movie set. It was like the apocalypse,” he said.
It took another couple of days before the internet connection was restored.
Meanwhile, authorities had turned off the water due to contamination concerns.
“I was okay because, on my property, I’ve got a 30,000-litre rainwater tank. So I was just saying to the neighbours, ‘bring a bucket, come and help yourself,’ which they were,” Church said.
Cyclone Also Brought Hope and Community
Despite the wreckage and loss left behind by Cyclone Gabrielle, Church also gained a lot from the experience.“There’s neighbours I didn’t know I had, and now I know them quite well because I feel like I spent a lot of time with them,” he said. “We felt like there was a real sense of community which hasn’t been there before, and it will probably stay now.”
He also came to realise just how resilient and adaptable people can be, even without electricity, food, and running water.
“What’s interesting is once the food that goes off goes, because you have to throw it out, you can actually survive for a long time. You can last for days and days and probably weeks if you had to,” he said, adding that people just needed water and something to cook on.
“So quite quickly, [we] got used to it. It was about a week before things actually started to come around.”
National Weather Service Bears Some of the Blame
Church also had some criticism for the national services, such as the national forecaster MetService which issues warnings for weather events in the country.“There’s a bit of a tendency of the MetService to cry wolf,” he said.
“Often, they’ll come out making these exaggerated claims about these things, and then invariably, the event will happen, and it’s nothing near as bad as what we expected it was going to be.
Recovery to Take a Long Time
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins visited Hawke’s Bay to witness first-hand the impact of Gabrielle on New Zealand’s primary sector, particularly growers.“While we can see images of that on the TV news, actually seeing it up front really brings home the reality of that,” he told reporters on March 1.
“When you’re driving past orchards, and you’re seeing caravans in the trees, you just realise the strength of the natural disaster that unfolded. That’s pretty confronting.
“The depth of the silt in areas, seeing people clearing their household contents out on the side of the road because that’s the only place they can put it—it’s pretty tough.”
Hipkins said it was still too early to tell how much food prices will be impacted, as it depended on which crops could still be harvested and which ones would be written off entirely.
Hawke’s Bay was the region most impacted by the cyclone. Power is still being restored across the region, with Patoka the latest town to be reconnected.
The Wairoa and Gisborne districts also continue to receive heavy amounts of rainfall.
Wairoa’s deputy mayor, Denise Eaglesome-Karekare, told Radio New Zealand that on Feb. 28, some areas that the cyclone hadn’t affected are now become flooded from the continuous rain.
“People who have been doing all that work in their homes—it’s now mud again, and it’s probably a lot harder to shift because it’s not solid; it’s runny.”
