By Ashley Church
Living right on the outside perimeter of the Esk Valley, on Whirinaki Beach in Hawkes Bay, I’ve had a box seat on the carnage of Cyclone Gabrielle over the past week.
Miraculously, our home wasn’t touched – but starting just a few metres inland the devastation is unbelievable and the best way to describe it is as a tsunami which has come from the land, rather than the sea.
Hundreds of millions of litres of water was rapidly funnelled down through the valley and channelled in a way which made it an unstoppable destructive force – destroying everything in its path and changing the landscape of that beautiful part of the country for years to come. Further on, large sections of State Highway 5, to Taupo, and State Highway 2, to Gisborne – both of which converge in that valley – have been rendered impassable and will take months to be fully repaired to a state where traffic will flow freely again.
For us, the inconvenience of no power, no water and (until recently) no internet are small sacrifices in light of the total loss of homes and livelihoods suffered by many just a little further up the valley – and our thoughts and prayers are with those stricken kiwis.
The response to the disaster from Councils, Power and Lines Companies and Roading Authorities has been mixed. At a corporate level, communication and remediation by these has been far too slow and measured and it’s hard not to see this as a reflection of the fragmentation of decision making over the past thirty+ years – with the introduction of labourious HR practices, new and superfluous layers of management, and more concern for cultural sensitivity and ‘identity’ issues than attention to the emergency measures for which the public rely on them.
However, on the ground, emergency services have been amazing. The humour and goodwill with which these people have gone about the task of supporting and reassuring residents has been northing short of heroic and has rubbed off on the wider Whirinaki community which has banded together, sharing food, water and power generation in something which can only be described as a carnival atmosphere.
Contrast that with the debacle of the failed Covid response where we were being lectured at, daily, on the minutia of how we should be behaving across a whole range of activities in which the Government had no business, all while that same Government was deliberately fomenting a culture of division and repression the effect of which is still being felt.
Instead, Gabrielle has brought out the best in us allowing kiwi common sense to shine as we’ve exercised good judgement and resilience, and are now committed to recovering from the impact of this disaster in the same irrepressible way that kiwis always do.
There’s a lesson in that for this and future Govts. Instead of trying to control us – focus on the stuff that you’re elected to do. We’ve seen the damage that can be wrought by the overreach of an ideological tyrant and we will never tolerate it again.
