Kim Baker Wilson was among the first reporters to arrive in Hawke's Bay after Cyclone Gabrielle struck. He reflects on what the harrowing first few days were like.
There’s a piece of paper still in my wallet a year later.
Harvie Beetham had come looking for his search and rescue pilot son.
But at the empty helicopter base, he instead found me.
He scribbled down his number even though I’d never be able to call or message it.
Mobile phones weren’t working. Hardly anything was working.
I’d arrived at the neighbouring airport hours earlier.
The Air New Zealand cabin crew had given me a huge handful of lollies, "you’ll need these".
I was in Napier, but my colleagues were in Hastings, and we were cut off from each other.
Harvie asked if I had food and water, I didn’t have much.
He asked if I had cash which was the only way to pay for things, I didn’t.
He asked if I knew where I was going to be that night, and I didn’t.
He and his wife had just spent hours rescuing several people and bringing them to their home.
They had few of their own clothes left after hosing people down who were caked in sludge and dressing them with what they had.
Now Harvie was offering me a meal to eat and a place to stay that night if I was still stranded.
He promised he'd come back to the helicopter base to look for me in case my chopper never came.
I wasn't able to tell him it did and I was safe.
Back at the main airport terminal people were seeking refuge – there was power and there was wi-fi and they could come here to charge their phones and try to contact family.
There was a flurry of weary people trying to get out of the area – or get into it – and a rotation of Air Force helicopters doing both.
A waiting woman who'd fled her home for an evacuation centre told me there were so many terrible things happening in the world.
Maybe it was their turn, she wondered, for something bad to happen to them.
Maybe it was time they suffered too.
Her mind was trying to make sense of the nonsensical, trying to describe the indescribable.
It’s unusual for me to be struck by something so early in a disaster deployment.
After Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu it was the confronting sight of children in the local hospital.
And in Fiji after Cyclone Winston it was the woman, standing in water inside her roofless home, saying I was the first person she’d seen since the storm.
There was no help for her, and I couldn’t help.
But those moments came days later when fatigue set in.
This was day one.
I waited alone in the darkened helicopter base and the chopper eventually came.
Our reporter Henry McMullan was in it, using it to film Napier from above.
In one of his few, short windows of working communication a producer in Auckland managed to get him a message to get to me.
After we took off he caught a glimpse of his house surrounded by water.
He didn’t know if it was OK. He didn’t know if his partner was OK. He couldn’t contact her.
The pilot didn’t have long to spare because there were others that desperately needed help.
Dreaded toll
When the endless water and mud came it took away homes and roads, lives and livelihoods.
Nobody knew how many had died.
I dreaded what I thought could be a repeat of the Christchurch earthquakes where day after day media were summoned to be given a new toll.
People in frayed communities scrambling to find food and fuel and loved ones began to agonise as the communication outages dragged on.
Well-intentioned but false rumours were spreading - of officials hiding a huge number of dead, or of a bridge collapsing into the water with cars still on it.
I would talk with seasonal workers who needed rescuing from their roofs and who were now homeless away from home.
They were sleeping on the floor and didn't know if they'd have jobs to go back to.
Or there was the couple now clearing out their sodden property the day after they were in a boat in their backyard.
And there was the stoic orchardist now in tears.
So many had uncertain futures and none of them knew when the uncertainty would ease.
It would end up being weeks and months.
And things that at any other time would be absurd and unfathomable were now becoming daily sights.
The apple orchards near Hastings that I thought were empty paddocks, but had actually had almost every big tree ripped out of the ground.
The crops peppered across the roofs of tall buildings in Pakowhai, still resting up high where the towering floodwaters dumped them.
The woman who arrived to work out how to get the dead cow out from the house it was swept into.
I knew what I was seeing was nowhere near the worst.
Television can show you what it looks like but it can’t give you the stench of the mud or the rotting homes.
It can't give you the feeling of the slippery, unsteady slurry deep under people's feet.
A kind person with electricity watching my stories messaged me offering my crew and I a place to be if we needed.
Another local gauging the damage as he came across us doing live-crosses one dark early morning offered us his coffee.
I’ve asked one of our camera-operators what he remembers one year later.
One of the first things that came to his mind wasn’t anything he’d filmed, it was something he’d felt.
The people – "they were so open, so honest and so generous at the worst possible time," he said.
They still are a year on.
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