Essay: It is four months today since a National State of Emergency was declared, as Cyclone Gabrielle smashed her way down the country, claiming 11 lives, eroding coastline, and drowning homes, farms and land. John Campbell returns to visit some of those affected.
Blake Briant is standing in his apple orchard, 20 minutes out of Gisborne. He has moved 500 truckloads of silt out of here, but still we are standing on silt.
His young son, George, is eating one of the apples that didn’t make it to market. So much of their fruit didn’t make it to market. Blake Briant thinks Gabrielle will have cost him somewhere in the region of $3 million.
Dave Pikia is in Te Karaka, 20 minutes north. He’s talking to us in the community’s new “pod” village, made up of shipping-container sized cabins, trucked in to temporarily house those who lost their homes, and everything inside their homes, when the community was so devastatingly flooded.
That night, he tells me, when they found themselves forced out of their homes in the torrential rain and terrifying dark, when they drove along deeply flooded roads not knowing whether their cars would make it, when they climbed a hill to get above the flooding and save their lives, has had such an impact on some of the children that they are retraumatised every time it rains.
Those awful nights and days.
And what joins Dave Pikia and Blake Briant, although they do not even know each other, is that the places that are so dear to them are both beside the Waipaoa River – and it was river flooding, not direct rainfall, that did so much damage to their whenua.
Rivers flood, of course. In a cyclone as big as Gabrielle, what else can a river do but flood?
But there’s an increasing sense in Tairāwhiti that the rivers flooded more than they should have, because we haven’t looked after them.
When Gabrielle hit we were in Gisborne.
Cameraman Andy Dalton and I spent hours watching as the region’s rivers rose, as the forest and forestry debris carried down in the flooding waters bashed bridges into nothingness. We watched as the willow trees planted along riverbanks disappeared into the rivers.
We watched as rivers rose so high they became indistinguishable from the land around them, and then the land around them became a river, too.
Our rivers need better care
And now that we’re back in Gisborne, people keep telling us, over and over and over, that the rivers have to be better cared for, better managed, so that when the cyclones come, as they will, the rivers can hold the water in, and carry it out to sea.
Some of this is folly.
As I was writing this, wanting to know the history of the Waipaoa, I found the “Economic Review of the Waipaoa Flood Control Scheme”, from 1988, just after Cyclone Bola.
Months after the event, growers are still feeling the pain. (Source: 1News)
The document reviewing the flood control scheme is admirable in its prescience. “With a level of protection up to a 100 year return period flood,” the review tells us, “the scheme has precipitated an intensification of land use within the Gisborne plains.” And then, discretely, it whispers a warning: “Flood stopbanks imply absolute protection, encouraging capital intensive development within floodplains.”
The development happened, of course. Why wouldn’t it? The river was under control. The climate was so encouraging. The land was so fertile and good. The possibilities were golden, like kiwifruit.
But, and we all now know this “but” so thoroughly, climate change.
As storms become more common, and the rivers flood more often, what can we do to save the land that’s flooding?
Dave Pikia and Blake Briant both tell me the answer – keep everything but water (and the welcome things that live in it) out. Stop the forestry slash from forming dams. Stop the willow trees from spreading spread their roots into the riverbeds, forming other dams and diverting the river’s flow in countless, tiny ways.
And there’s one more thing, more important, both men tell me, than everything else - control the erosion into rivers, that causes sedimentation and raises riverbeds, and that means less rain is required for a river to flood.
That review we saw earlier, 35 years old but, in parts, timely and vitally relevant, tells us exactly the same thing.
“Of particular importance for flood control in the Waipaoa Catchment,” it asserts, “is control of soil erosion in the upper catchment. The unstable hill country is depositing huge quantities of material into the Waipaoa River and its tributaries… …raising mean bed levels.”
And then the review tells us what Dave Pikia, Blake Briant and so many people along the Waipaoa River have recently lived: “The deposited material results in much increased damage from flood inundation.” Yes. It does.
None of this is easy.
But the people in Te Karaka who lost their homes and their belongings, and who are now living in temporary cabins, or the Briant family at Kaitere Farms, with a $3 million loss from a single flood event, already know that.
The problem, as we were told by that extraordinary review in 1988, is that the most effective way of saving pastoral land near rivers from flooding is to “retire the land permanently from pastoral production”.
Who’s going to have that conversation?
Who’s going to pay for that?
Land being stolen by the sea
But we live in a country where the land and what’s on it is increasingly being flooded by rain, where coastal land is increasingly being stolen by the sea, and where rivers are increasingly prescribing their own paths. What are we going to do about that?
In the Hekia Parata led “slash report”, more formally described as the “The report of the Ministerial Inquiry into woody debris (including forestry slash) and sediment in Tairāwhiti/Gisborne and Wairoa”, the foreword contains a poetic fury:
“Papatuanuku is battered and bleeding, Ranginui a fury, and Tane Mahuta bent and breaking. Sedimentation from more than a thousand untreated gullies, trees, logs and slash off hills that should never be plantation planted or clear felled, waterways choked with debris flows, riverbeds aggraded, coastlines suffocated and dangerous, roads and bridges unfit, unpassable, and many broken.
“Ngāti Porou tangata whenua, the people of this land, are in peril, at risk of becoming homeless and landless. We saw and list to their grief, exhaustion, fear – of the next storm, of the next rain, and for the future. We felt called to urgent action.”
The report describes what people told them: “On several occasions we heard from communities about river blockages and debris that had been identified as being a flood risk, but which had not been addressed. These ultimately contributed to rivers overwhelming flood controls or riverbanks, increasing flood damage.”
And then the Report describes calls for “a return to ‘catchment board days’ of active river management”.
We keep getting it wrong.
In the Gisborne Herald, Dame Anne Salmond, anthropologist, environmentalist and writer, reminds us: “In response to widespread erosion, central government decided to use pine plantations instead of native forests to try to heal the land. In the 1980s, central government then privatised these ‘conservation forests’, selling them to New Zealand companies which sold them to offshore investors.”
And now the debris from the trees that were sold is filling rivers and causing them to dam. And the erosion that was not prevented turns the water to a terrible, thick, smothering silt.
Blake Briant is standing in silt as I talk to him. He grows apples, kiwifruit and grapes. None of his crops here survived without damage. His grandfather started the business that has become Kaitere Farms. Blake runs it with his father, Pete, and his brother, Fraser. Maybe, one day, little George will join them?
Can the orchards survive until then?
The Briants’ orchards are between two rivers – the Waipaoa and the Te Arai. Blake Briant feels under siege from both of them.
“We’ve never been worse placed or worse prepared in my opinion,” he tells me, “which is sad. We should have made progress since Bola. We should have learnt lessons. But we’ve let something even worse happen.”
Dave Pikia lived through Bola, and he’s living through Gabrielle and its aftermath. He thinks Gabrielle was worse, even though way more rain fell in Bola. Bola flooded them out of the sky. Gabrielle flooded them out of the sky and the river. It was the river that would have drowned them.
He is Te Aitanga a Mahaki. His iwi’s deep connection to this whenua go back hundreds of years.
So, too, is the writer, Witi Ihimaera. Let a sentence from his beloved novel, Whale Rider, make us remember an existential truth: “Man might carve his mark on the earth, but unless he’s vigilant, Nature will take it all back.”
Watch John Campbell's documentary about the devastating impacts of forestry slash:
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