The tragic human cost of Cyclone Gabrielle

This week’s massive cyclone across New Zealand’s North Island is unprecedented. It produced more widespread damage than the last such storm, Cyclone Bola of 1988. There is some evidence of even larger storms in the fifteenth century, knocking down swathes of trees. But nothing in historical times.

My home district, Hawke’s Bay, took a heavy blow. Although I moved to Wellington first for study and then work in 1981 – and was there when the cyclone hit this week – I spend as much time as I can in the bay, and my home town of Napier remains very much part of my life. I have long-standing friends and family there. It was horrifying to watch report after report of the flood damage – in Napier, primarily caused by the Tutaekuri river, on the southern edge of the city and adjacent to the largest suburb, Taradale, rising to burst its stop-banks. The Tutaekuri was not the only river to rise: others did the same, sweeping across wide stretches of land. North of Napier the Esk (Waiohinanga) river – flooded to unprecedented levels and devastated multiple small communities. In the north the Wairoa river rose extraordinarily and cut off the town of the same name, stranding 9000 people. To the south of Napier the Waipawa river rose and inundated half the town of the same name.

This description of Hawke’s Bay is not to reduce the equivalent scale of devastation across the upper and eastern North Island, destruction that confronted dozens of communities and, sadly, has carried a rising death toll. My own focus, though – watching, in effect, through texts and messages (such as were possible) and via posts on Facebook – was on my home town of Napier and particularly the Tutaekuri river and Taradale. My brother and his family live there.

Suburban Taradale, part of Napier, New Zealand. I took this photo from Dolbel Park in November 2021. In February 2023 this area was flooded by Cyclone Gabrielle.

For a little history, both Napier and Hastings are built on alluvial flood-plains, created by three rivers: the Tutaekuri river (it’s Te Reo Maori for ‘dogshit’, a reference to offal being hurled into it), the Ngaruroro river (literally ‘wave-fish’, a contraction of ‘ngaruupokororo’, ‘waves of the head of the fish’, a reference to patterns made in the water by grayling), and the Tukituki river (‘to knock over’). Before European settlers arrived in numbers from the 1850s, these rivers wandered across the plains as rain and flood changed their flows. Arguments over how to control them began almost immediately, but nobody wanted to pay for proper stop banks and – to cut a long story short – it wasn’t until a devastating earthquake in 1931 altered the fall of all three that a permanent fix was eventually applied.

A photo I took of Marewa, a suburb of Napier, December 2014. The Canary Island palms give a distinct California vibe, which was part of the intentional design of this suburb when it was developed in the late 1930s after a devastating earthquake raised the land. Part of the reason why it was made possible was because a major stop-bank programme tamed the rivers of the district and reduced flood risk.

The system completed in 1938, and its modifications since, was tested to and beyond its limits this week. One of the first problems was that water inundated the main district sub-station at Redclyffe, adjacent to the Tutaekuri but usually protected by the stop-bank, cutting power to the district. The sub-station was identified as at risk of flooding in 2020, but of course nothing was done then. Soon after the power went out, all but one of the cell networks went down, along with the remaining landlines. At least one fibre cable was also cut. Suddenly, Hawke’s Bay was mostly cut off. The disaster underscored the fragility of the infrastructure underpinning modern communications and the ‘information age’.

Still, the news that came through was horrific; and one of the saddest parts were pleas from friends and family of those in the disaster area, posting on Facebook and elsewhere for news of their loved ones. Have you seen my parents? Last seen floating away on their car’; ‘Have you seen my elderly father, last seen at —-?’; ‘Can anybody tell me if —– is OK, they’ve been missing since yesterday?’ And so on. Heart-felt expressions of humanity for whom no succour could be offered, because communications were so badly broken. One family sought their mother for four days: her home had been inundated. Yesterday (17 February) – and tragically – she was found dead.

This public effort to find missing loved ones did not include private messages to friends, of which there were many. I fielded one myself from a Napier friend whose mother was cut off. I was able to get through to my friend’s mother and discovered all was well, passing on the message. Later I heard from my brother: I had internet in Wellington. They didn’t, in Napier. Could I confirm an evacuation order? I checked. Civil Defence hadn’t issued one – the problem was malicious gossip.

That incident highlighted one of the stupidest parts of the whole catastrophe. Much of the emergency communication was handled via web-pages and Facebook. This was weird: the power failure and destruction of major fibre links meant there wasn’t much internet in the disaster zone. The old standby of roving emergency vehicles with loud-hailers was absent. And Facebook began filling up with wild gossip. Another dark side of the whole event, aside from the broader human tragedy, was the way crime spiked: generators set up to power cellphone towers were stolen, among other things.

My home district has certainly suffered a colossal disaster. The rainfall was extraordinary. Iconic bridges were destroyed, including this one on Vicarage Road, where I used to swim with friends when I was at high school. Back then there was a bank to the left and a deep hole just past the bridge.

I took this photo of the bridge on Vicarage Road over the Tutaekuri river, Hawke’s Bay, in February 2021. It was swept away in February 2023 during Cyclone Gabrielle. River levels in this photo are normal for summer, giving an idea of just how far the waters rose.

The frightening part is that all five bridges across the Tutaekuri, connecting Napier to the south, were unserviceable within hours – three destroyed, two underwater or close to it. Even the rail-bridge was broken. The loss of road connection also cut Napier off from all hospital services. How can a major city not a have a hospital, you ask? Back in the mid-1990s a neo-liberal hatchet-man was brought in by government to get rid of Napier’s public hospital. You see, there was another hospital in Hastings, just 19 km distant. And yeah, that’s not much by modern standards. But two flood-prone rivers separate the cities. My dad knew the guy and tackled him about it: what happens if there’s a disaster and the bridges are gone? Do Napier people just die? The answer my father got was typical. It wasn’t the hatchet-man’s problem, he was there to get rid of the hospital. Well quite. I hope the hatchet-man can sleep at night. (I say this rhetorically – of course the hatchet-man that did this sleeps well, revelling in the knowledge of state money saved so the rich can be taxed less. And if the poor die because they choose not to buy their own helicopters so they can fly themselves to medical help – well, that’s proof of natural selection, isn’t it?)

One of the bridges taken out by the flood-waters was the Rissington bridge on the Mangaone river (roughly, ‘muddy river branch’), a tributary of the Tutaekuri. Rissington is extremely familiar to me: as kids we were often taken on family picnics to the river, just below the bridge. Later a family friend lived just around the corner from the bridge and my family routinely spent New Years’ day there, often down at the Mangaone below the bridge where a dangling rope prompted Tarzan swings into the water. Now the whole lot is gone. Ironically, this bridge was completed in 1929 to replace one that had been swept away by floods in 1924.

The bridge over the Mangaone river at Rissington, Hawke’s Bay. I took this photo in May 2008 and always feel it has a ‘bridges of Madison County’ vibe.

And here’s a photo, which I grabbed from Facebook, showing the bridge now. I hope the photographer doesn’t mind. I think it was taken looking in the same direction as my photo above, about where the white fence ends adjacent to the bridge.

Rissington bridge, February 2023. Photographer unidentified.

As I write these words the disaster continues to unfold, driven in part by the fact that the storm destroyed key infrastructure, cutting off not only power and communications but also key transport links. One of the major problems has been the failure of power and, with it, both EFT-POS and ATM machines. Without EFT-POS, the ‘cashless society’ doesn’t work – and without an ATM, nobody can get cash.

The disaster has served to reinforce my cynicism about the way successive neo-liberal governments have variously under-funded and sold off crucial public services ranging from roads to hospitals and power grids, leaving them vulnerable and without resilience. But for now, all thoughts must turn to all those affected, not only in my home district but in all places beyond – the two-thirds of the North Island that was torn by the cyclone. My home district and the East Cape region to the north of it were hardest hit. And we must think of those who lost their lives, of their grieving families and friends, of those who have gone without power, with food and water running short and no way of communicating to the outside world.

It has been a human disaster of the largest scale for New Zealand, and the cost is likely to continue rolling in.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2023