by Josie Dew
The first day I arrived here the Waipoua River was looking boisterous, brown and fast. And full. In the early hours of this morning I was lying in the dark in my tent in the TV room listening to the rain on the roof and the bedlam of howling wind knifing around the corners of the building, when I became aware of another noise slowly overriding all of this. It sounded like an express train. By torchlight I waded through the rain and the water and went to investigate. It wasn’t difficult to source the noise. It was the river. It had risen by several feet and was a blasting torrent of fury. I could even see waves – white caps, or brown caps – churning like an angry sea. Every now and then I saw large lumps flowing past at speed. By dawn I could see what these large lumps were: trees, bits of fencing, hay bales, slabs of wood and, at one point, a dead cow.
The papers are full of nothing but floods and rivers reaching record highs and the 200 mm of rain that has fallen within twenty-four hours in the part of New Zealand in which I happen to be. The Wairarapa Times is covered in headlines like: ‘SWAMPED AGAIN’; ‘ALL ROUTES OUT OF DISTRICT CUT OFF’; ‘31 WAIRARAPA ROADS BLOCKED BY FLOODWATER’; ‘TWO MEN MISSING PRESUMED DROWNED’. Mauriceville (site of historically disappointing village hall), which I cycled through three days ago, has no power and has been cut off from everywhere else by 1.5 metres of floodwater covering the roads and what appear to be called ‘slips’. I always thought slips were another word for pants or petticoats, but in this context it seems they are mudslides or rockslides. Here’s a taster of what the Wairarapa Times is saying:
Many Mauriceville residents have had to be evacuated from their homes in the early hours of this morning … Farmers were up all night trying to move stock to higher ground in the darkness and rain … One man shifting pigs around 4 a.m. had to get his son to swim to a gate to open it because the water was so high in his paddock.
A state of civil emergency has been declared for some areas around here. Parts of the main railway between Wellington and Auckland are under water; bridges and houses have been washed away; whole roads have disappeared. Thousands of sheep and cattle have been swept away by rising rivers, along with vehicles, farm sheds and equipment. One evacuee, talking about water outside his front door, was quoted in the paper as saying, ‘There’s like two or three metres of water out here, with all sorts of stuff floating down. It’s just amazing.’ Another resident said, ‘We have been told the road is gone and it will be six months before we can get back in.’
People are being airlifted off buildings by helicopter and rescued by jet boat. Other residents are making daring rescues themselves to save neighbours. Tuffy Churton, which sounds more like the name of a cartoon duck than a man, has become a local hero by breaking into a house and swimming through the floating furniture to rescue a frail old man.
In Wellington’s paper, The Dominion Post, under what they are calling ‘THE BIG WET’, there are more stories of heroism. Under a headline ‘Saved by lasso and a trusty hacksaw’, I read of a farmer who had to climb on to the roof of his farmhouse with his wife and son and five dogs. They took with them food and a change of clothing, a piece of rope and a hacksaw – the hacksaw being the son’s idea. ‘You never know, Dad,’ he said. ‘It might come in handy.’
And so it proved to be. After several hours on the roof the farmer managed to lasso his boat, which was chained to a trailer, and pull it over to the house. Then he dived in and cut the chain with the hacksaw. The family and posse of dogs motored upstream to a neighbour’s property, where they came across 300 lambs trapped in a paddock surrounded by water and opened a gate to let them out. ‘The lambs saw the gate open and swam for it,’ said the farmer, ‘but they missed it and got hooked up on a fence. So I got out the old trusty hacksaw and cut the fence in two or three places and then we worked hard pushing and throwing them over the fence. We saved about 250. It was a small victory.’
The Rumahanga River, which runs just outside Masterton, has stopbanks designed to handle 1500 cubic metres of water a second, but at its peak it has been flowing at around 2000 cubic metres a second – the largest flow ever known for the river. The Manawatu River, which flows through the Manawatu Gorge (which was closed a week ago when I tried to cycle through it), has been flowing at a depth of 8.9 metres. That’s about 30 feet deep. No wonder so many sheep and cattle are getting washed away. About thirty cattle, mostly cows and calves, have been found on their way to do a little window-shopping in Palmerston North. They were discovered wandering through the town’s Esplanade area after being swept down the Manawatu River. A helpline has been set up for homeless cows. Something called The Livestock Improvement Corporation is asking town dwellers or ‘lifestyle block owners’ all over the region who find cows washed downstream in floodwaters to note their ear tag numbers and to ring the freephone hotline so that the cows can be reunited with their owners.
Although thousands of sheep and cattle are missing, feared drowned, some have had lucky escapes with some exciting stories to relay to their grandchildren. I heard a radio report describe how a flock of sheep were swept away to certain death only to be found several kilometres further on, contentedly grazing where they had washed up. But in general, cows have a higher chance of survival as they make the best buoyancy aids. As dairy farmer Michael McAloon put it to The Dominion Post, ‘A cow is a 44-gallon drum on legs and they float pretty easily. Three hundred came through the Manawatu Gorge on Monday night and many of them survived the trip.’
Cows are even coming to the rescue of drowning humans. ‘THROW ME A COW, I’M DROWNING’ reads one headline. The paper described how a swimming cow saved the life of Kim Riley, a Woodville dairy farmer, in raging floodwaters near the mouth of the Manawatu Gorge. Mrs Riley and her husband Keith were moving their 350 cows to high ground last Monday night but the cows, obviously keen to try out their doggy-paddle skills, headed into a swollen river. ‘Kim tried to head them off on foot,’ said Mr Riley, ‘but the current swept her off her feet. She got swept along with the cows and couldn’t get back to land. She missed a couple of chances to grab a tree and a post and then a couple of cows swam over the top of her. It wasn’t looking too good, but then she grabbed a cow and managed to hang on. The cow swam 200 to 300 metres through the water till it got its footing and took her to safety.’ She says she has taken a note of her rescuer’s tag number and is going to repay her with a drum of molasses.
When Mr Riley was asked if he had been relieved to see his wife safe he said, ‘Well, I asked her what she thought she was doing going for a swim when she was meant to be getting the cows in.’
The Sunday Star Times has charted the rainfall for the past week. Normally the average February rainfall for the ranges of the region I’m in now is 340 mm. But in only six days 550 mm has fallen. The Dominion Post has a list of what to do during an emergency in this flooded time. Along with doing obvious things like boiling rainwater and throwing away any food that has been submerged in floodwater, there’s a tip for making a temporary toilet by ‘lining a bucket or rubbish bin with a strong leak-proof plastic bag. Put half a cup of liquid bleach in the bag. Bury the bag when full, away from vegetable gardens and downhill from water sources.’ I’d have thought it would be better for everyone, including the earth, simply to take a shovel and dig a hole and go in that every time the need arises.
The radio is advising people to ‘get an emergency kit ready of food, water, batteries and birth certificate.’ It also says ‘Don’t enter floodwater alone.’ Which rather begs the question: what are you supposed to do – take a friend? Because sometimes you haven’t got much choice – the water can take you before you’ve had a chance to ponder the dilemma of entering the floodwater alone.
There again you could take a cow, the perfect buoyancy aid to survival.
The final piece of advice: ‘Don’t go sightseeing flooded areas.’
But advice like this is just wasted on people who feel their only vocation in life is to stir up the muddy floodwaters of trouble. On the letter page of The Dom
inion Post there is ‘A plea to 4WD drivers’. Brian Smaller wrote:
With floodwaters in our street already getting into our house and garage, it was more than frustrating to see people sightseeing in 4WDs. The wake from their mostly high-speed dashes through the water sent waves washing into our already flooded property.
I know the floods presented those with 4WDs with a golden opportunity to drive in difficult conditions within the confines of suburbia but I would say to them that their lack of compassion for those affected was surpassed only by their ignorance of the potential and actual damage they caused.
I hope that, next time, they’ll do what the authorities advised: stay at home.
Tuning into my radio I heard that today of all days (thrashing rain, hurricane winds, flooded roads) is National Bike to Work Day – motto: ‘Get Bike Wise for National Bike Week’. There’s an advert on the radio that warns: ‘When you cut corners you could cut up a cyclist. Don’t burst their bubble.’
Apart from German tourists on bikes, the odd mountain biker and clump of racing cyclists, I haven’t seen anyone riding a bike in New Zealand at the best of times so I can’t imagine today is going to be a roaring success for encouraging commuters to mount their dusty steeds and cycle off gaily to the office. Ploughing through my pile of papers (well, I haven’t got much else to do with myself except get flooded or find a cow) I can only see a couple of references to bikes, one of which is a letter in The Dominion Post by Peter Keller from Ngaio, who wrote:
I suppose that while I am riding my bicycle, I am unlikely to be pinged by some policeman manning a speed trap. However, I would like to point out that if I am hit by a car at 60 km/h, there is 44 per cent more energy available to mangle me than if I were hit at 50 km/h.
Many 50-tonne logging trucks career along these roads at 100 km/h or more. Should they crash into me I have no idea what percentage of energy they have available to mangle me. All I know is that it would be a messy result and a terrible waste of a very nice bike.
The other reference to bikes I’ve come across is hardly going to encourage a generation of cyclists to break free on their wheels. Some ‘Education Review Office’ report on a Lower Hutt (one of the ‘dormitory’ cities just outside Wellington) early childhood centre has suggested it should introduce ‘trikeless days’ because ‘tricycles encouraged not only competition and ownership, but aggression. It is only natural for a parent to protect their children from danger,’ concludes this completely hare-brained report. Whoever writes this nonsense should be hurled into the Manawatu River – preferably when it’s in full flood. And don’t throw them any life-saving cows. We don’t want them back.
Wellington, 19 February
Well, here I am in Wellington – a currently very appropriately named city seeing as the headline on the front page of The Dominion Post is ‘BRACE FOR NEW STORMS – GLOOMY FORECAST: 120 KMH GUSTS AND MORE RAIN TO COME’. Though I think more than wellies are needed – more like a storm bunker.
Yesterday I made the most of a brief lull in the weather to make my final assault to this windy capital. Apart from sudden bursts of forceful showers the morning was dry as I left Masterton, riding past trees poleaxed by the gales through the ‘tons’ and towns of Carterton, Greytown and Featherston. Actually I didn’t so much ride as half drag and half fight with my bike in order to control it in the battering wind that slammed into me from all angles like a crate of concrete. By the time I arrived in Featherston (‘Gateway to the Wairarapa!’) the sky had collapsed in on itself and the rain was falling like the Battle of Agincourt’s armies of arrows. It was impossible to walk down the street without being blown over. Instead you had to move along the pavement from one handhold (lamp post, railing, letterbox) to another as if clambering about the decks of an oscillating ship pounded by storming seas. Any pedestrians who were silly enough to be out in all this looked as if they were seriously drunk.
Featherston is the last town before the climb up over the Rimutaka Range – a mountainous road notoriously windy at the best of times, but completely ludicrous in the present gales. It came as no surprise to hear that this road was temporarily closed owing to the vigorous weather, a jack-knifed truck and a rockslide. There were also rumours of a motorhome having been blown clean off the side. So instead I paid £5 for a backpacker’s bunk (on which I ended up camping – that way I kept warmer and drier as the window, taking the full force of the wind, was leaking like an underwater porthole) at the Leeway, which was part motel, part backpackers. I spent the rest of the day either eating, reading, putting a new chain on my bike or loitering in the Fell Locomotive Museum.
It’s amazing how bad weather can suddenly make you take an uncharacteristic interest in something that you would otherwise pass off as steam-buff fodder. Five minutes after I walked into the museum, I had suddenly become worryingly fascinated by the NZR Fell locomotive H199 – the only remaining Fell engine in the world – which for seventy-seven years successfully made the 1:15 grade climb of the Rimutaka Incline on three rails over the Rimutaka Range until a tunnel was built in 1955. I climbed up into the cab of the gleamingly restored engine to peer at and take photographs of shiny levers and pulls called things like blower control, test cocks, main steam turret valve, whistle control lever, westing-house pump. A most enjoyable experience – especially as I was the only one in the museum. Every one else was stuck in floods.
The road was still closed over the Rimutakas this morning so I took a train through that tunnel in the mountains and got out the other side to cycle through the flat urban sprawl of the Hutt Valley to Wellington. I had been hoping to jump straight on to the Inter-island ferry to cross over to South Island, but not surprisingly all boats have been cancelled because of rough seas in the Cook Strait, that narrow passage of water which acts as a wind funnel for the constant westerlies that hammer through the area from the volatile temperaments of the Tasman Sea. On my way to using the toilets in a downtown Wellington cafe I walked past a television and watched a bit of the news. A handful of passengers who had caught the last ferry over to Wellington before they were all cancelled were recalling their ‘voyage of hell’. The crossing, which normally takes three hours, took six because of high winds and an eleven-metre swell. Double-trailer trucks toppled over, others had their roofs ripped off, cars were crushed. One man said, ‘It was a nightmare! I threw up three times – I want a refund!’
7
Picton, Marlborough, South Island, 20 February
I had to abandon any thoughts of diary writing last night as all hands were needed to man the decks. I ended up camping out in some of the severest weather I think I’ve ever camped in. Although I had an address of a friend of a friend of a friend, there was no answer when I tried ringing their number (maybe they’ve got water in the line) and there was no time to linger around wondering what to do next; the weather was closing in and I had to act fast.
After trying several hostels and finding them all full, I finally found a big building called Rowena’s Lodge, crammed full of backpackers, where I could put my tent up alongside three other tents in a small, squashed-in, litter-strewn patch of worn-out land behind the hostel’s car park.
The wind was blowing such a flapping gale that just the act of trying to feed in the poles and get the tent up without the whole thing taking off for Eketahuna, or even Elephant Island, was like playing a major feat of Twister, involving all manner of legs and limbs (mostly mine, I believe) and rocks and panniers pinning down every available corner. I hammered in all the pegs as far as they would go with a rock, but the billowing and ballooning tent still looked as if it could launch itself into the stratosphere at any moment. So I hurriedly threw in my heavy ballast of multiple panniers and gathered up every boulder in the vicinity and dropped them on top of every peg.
Then the rain started, pelting my tent like lead shot. Although it was only early evening (a supposed summer evening at that!), day turned immediately to night beneath a filthy lowering sky of glowering intensity. Headlig
hts came on, streetlights came on, shop lights came on. The rain fell down and the wind blew with a frighteningly unnatural ferocity. The combination of the wind and the rain was completely deafening. I knew a man was in his Terra Nova tent only about six feet away from me, yet no matter how much we tried yelling to each other we couldn’t hear anything other than the sound of the hammering rain and howling wind. The noise was so intense that I couldn’t hear my radio even on full volume. My world had suddenly shrunk to the tiny confined space inside my tent. Nothing else beyond the torch beam of my fast-dampening abode existed.
Within moments of the storm starting the water came gushing down the slope, passing under my tent like a river. When I put my hand on my ground sheet there was so much water beneath me that it felt as if I was floating on a boating lake. And that’s after I had put my tent on a part of the site with the highest chances of drainage. I hated to think of the state of the other three tents, situated in dipping wallows.
Then came the lightning, followed hot on its tail by the crashes of thunder. Soon the thunder cracked with such shuddering explosions I instinctively cowered even though I was already flat on the ground and had nowhere else lower to cower. The idea of seeking shelter in the hostel did occur to me. But then I thought: I can’t abandon ship leaving all my dog-eared worldly possessions to fend for themselves. There was also something quite perversely enjoyable about the awfulness of the situation and seeing how much my tent (and I) could take before it (or my nerves) got ripped to shreds. Equipment-testing, I believe it’s called in the trade.