A pair of Ashburton farmers who rescued a couple of locals trapped in yesterday's dramatic flood waters after stranding their vehicle say firefighters would have been unable to help the pair.
Canterbury residents this morning woke to an ongoing state of emergency.
It comes after heavy rain pounded the region yesterday, forcing thousands of people to evacuate.
But for those too late, there were some dramatic rescues.
This morning on Breakfast, farmer Chris Allen and David Clark, who is the president of Federated Farmers for the area, shared how they showed up with lifejackets and saved the lives of two people in a "heroic rescue" in the early hours of yesterday morning.
Allen said he was driving around about 4am to check out the impact of the heavy rain.
"I looked across and there was some lights on the other side of what was normally a creek, right next to the south branch of the river, and I thought, 'That's a silly place to be.' There was nothing I could do so I just rang 111 and they said, 'Yeah, the people in the car had already made the phone call,' and that Fire and Emergency were already on their way.
"I just looked out there and thought, 'There's no way a fire engine and a few ropes are going to get to these people,' so I rang up David, woke him up nicely, and said, 'David, I think we might need someone with a very large tractor to come in from your side.'"
Allen said he used spotlights to watch Clark helping the pair, but admitted it was "a pretty nervous time".
However, Clark said, "You do what you do in a rural community."
He told Breakfast he'd let Allen know the night before to give him a bell if he needed any help from his side of the river.
"You just get on with it and that's exactly what we did, and the key point here is these people are so lucky that Chris saw what was happening [and] had the mind to say, 'We need a big piece of machinery to safely get out into these waters.' That was what was key to pulling this off and saving these people."
Describing the frantic moments as the vehicle nearly floated away, though, Clark said the couple "knew the predicament they were in".
The pair smashed the windows of the vehicle, then Clark passed them lifejackets in case they slipped into the water during the exit.
"I think it probably won't have hit them until we eventually got them home — they live locally — eventually got them home at just how serious things were," Clark said.
In an update on the rainfall, Clark said the weather was concerning around 11pm yesterday, but this morning he said it was "not looking too bad".
As for Allen, though, he described the "sheet of water" out his window.
"Until the rivers recede, we've got to try and get access to some stock but there's just no way standing on some higher ground. So we've just got to wait until the water recedes then go up there and feed everything else and do what we possibly can," he said.
"We'll do everything we can for them, the majority that we can, but there's just a few animals we're going to have to wait, bide our time."
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