How do you overcome a disaster on the scale of Cyclone Gabrielle? 1News reporter Thomas Mead revisits some of the survivors a year on to find the source of their remarkable strength.
As we followed the path of the cyclone, the silence swamped the car.
Outside was the transformed world of Esk Valley, a place where only two colours existed.
Blue sky and brown silt.
Amid the upturned cars and buried homes, I noticed something strange.
It was quiet. There was no wind. No insects. No birds.
That feeling was something I could never quite explain in news stories at the time.
In situations like these, in moments of great collective anguish, so often journalists find their way back to the sense of hope. We focus on the community response, as Kiwis do what Kiwis do.
In a decade of journalism, I’ve seen it over and over again: the feeling that we can overcome this, there when the hills burned, when neighbourhoods flooded, and the earth shook.
This time, it felt different.
I had been deployed to Hawke’s Bay to help with coverage of the cyclone alongside my colleague Nick Zieltjes, a veteran camera operator who filmed the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami.
For the first ten minutes in Eskdale, neither of us spoke.
It felt like landing on the surface of the moon. A metre-high layer of silt covered every surface, in every direction. We stared in disbelief at the cars buried up to their roofs, the house lifted off its foundations and carried half a kilometre up the valley. Even the church had been swallowed.
We found three volunteers who had taken the day off work to dig out the local restaurant. The job was so immense it almost made the interview awkward, these enthusiastic young men with shovels facing a pile of silt that was taller than they were.
Outside, recovery workers in overalls were combing houses and creeks for bodies. Thousands of people were missing. One man smashed open the windscreen of a hatchback, parked in what used to be a driveway, and started digging silt out of the driver’s seat.
I remember wondering, 'How do you come back from this?'. Even the air was toxic, the silt drying and sending up clouds of dust, leaving its victims with a cough that lasted for days.
Binding it all together was that silence, pervading every corner of the valley, the sludge drowning out even the sound of the cars driving by.
In that moment, the task felt impossible. Nature had conquered man. But I soon learned that they’re made of strong stuff on the East Coast.
‘Little bits at a time’: quiet courage in the hill country
To appreciate the wonder of what the people of Hawke’s Bay have achieved over the last year, you must first see where they began.
That same week, Nick and I took a helicopter to a small community named Patoka in the hill country.
It was six days after the cyclone, and we were the first news crew to arrive. Several bridges had been washed out, leaving a rural neighbourhood of 500 people stranded without power.
I’d managed to contact a tech-savvy farmer named Isabelle Crawshaw, who was running a Starlink satellite on a generator.
She sent the coordinates and was there waving, alongside her husband Patrick, as we flew in.
As we shook hands, a neighbour appeared in the drive looking for supplies. The couple were running a community food store in the back shed, pooling cans of spaghetti and Weet-Bix that had been “choppered in”.
We traversed to the back of their property where landslides had eaten into their fences, letting stock roam free, and turned 58 small paddocks into 16 big ones.
There, Patrick revealed the couple had been forced to fly their two girls Charlotte and Millie to the safety of family in the city. Charlotte was three. Millie was six-months-old.
With an avalanche of dirt in the background, I asked the dad how he was feeling.
“We took that opportunity to get them out, get them to a safer place than what we could offer,” he said, unable to stop the emotion pouring out.
“It was hard saying goodbye.”
For three weeks, the couple worked from first light until near midnight. But eventually, the helicopters stopped whirring.
The silence settled in Patoka too.
“Once that adrenaline wore off, you hit a low very quickly and very hard,” Isabelle said in a phone call last week.
“We definitely hit a breaking point.”
Thankfully Charlotte and Millie were able to come home when power was restored. This time, the girls made the journey over a river, crossing on the back of a tractor-trailer unit.
“The amazing thing about kids is that you just have to leave your problems at the door,” Isabelle said.
“They just give you a different sense, a reality check, that it’s not the end of the world, that it’s going to be OK.”
In all, they spent 16 days away.
“Honestly, they just thought they went on a holiday,” Isabelle laughed.
“They loved it, they were completely oblivious to what was going on.”
A year later, the Crawshaws still have to find $150,000 to repair their fences and tracks, as one of many farming families now facing years of recovery work.
Several of their paddocks are strung together with temporary fixes, waratahs and wire holding ground.
“We realised that trying to put everything back to exactly what it was right now is too much, and we just couldn’t do that,” Isabelle told me.
“We’ve just accepted the fact that it is what it is.”
How do you overcome the insurmountable?
“Little bits at a time,” Isabelle said.
Starting all over again in Pakowhai
We are so used to the noise.
Open your social media feed right now and you’re guaranteed to see some sort of outrage. Often the loudest voices rise to the top, leaving us feeling like the world is more divided than ever.
But there’s still plenty of good out there, it’s just happening quietly.
Two weeks after the cyclone, cameraman Nick and I found some of those brave Kiwis getting on with the job in silence.
By this time, thousands of people had responded to the call. There’d been a colossal volunteer effort, with so many donations arriving that officials had to turn the local showgrounds into a distribution centre.
But one more test was coming, with a fresh round of rain warnings issued for Hawke’s Bay.
We followed the volunteers to a semi-rural hideaway near Napier named Pakowhai, known for its apple orchards.
It was a cruel scene. The rain was falling all over again, inundating properties that had already been flooded. At one home they had decided to abandon any attempts of salvage, and a digger was simply dragging bookcases, clothes and carpet into a pile in the middle of the driveway.
“It’s disheartening really,” one volunteer told me, the mud coating his jacket. “You’ve just got to truck on”.
A few houses down we found Ruth Spittle, a retiree in her 70s facing the same bleak reality.
“It just floods again, and everything lifts and floats,” she told me.
The muddy pile of belongings at her property was 20 metres long. She took me on a tour of her home, which had been stripped back to the studs.
Here the water had gone right over the ceiling, leaving vegetables from the farm next door on the roofing iron. Spittle didn’t want to say much, preferring to work without any fuss, but used the word “gut wrenching”.
It was an understatement. After 20 years in this home, her plans for retirement were ruined.
“I never ever expected that we would end our lives with this sort of situation,” she told me.
In the months afterwards, Spittle and her partner Malcolm Guthrie bounced from place to place.
First it was accommodation in Havelock North, then the Clive Motor Camp and, eventually, with the cost of rent becoming overwhelming, they decided to use their retirement savings to buy a house in Napier.
They had to start all over again, many of the furnishings donated.
“We sort of scrounged around, we’re good op-shoppers now,” she told me in a phone call last month.
Their treasured home in Pakowhai looks just the same as it did last year, the walls stripped back to the studs, and has now been listed as a Category Three property, meaning they will receive a buyout offer.
They don’t know what that will look like yet. Because of the huge backlog, their first meeting with the council was only four weeks ago. If they take the buyout, they will never be able to return.
“It’s 20 years of your life gone, isn’t it,” Spittle told me.
“We’ve had to move on, we couldn’t live where we were.”
It’s been difficult to come to terms with, as they still feel like a house could safely be built on the land.
“I don’t know how to go, to get my voice heard further up the chain,” Spittle said.
How do you overcome the insurmountable?
She is still working that out.
“It’s sort of just been one step at a time,” she said.
‘The most amazing day’
When we returned to Esk Valley, something had changed.
It was a week after our first trip, and Nick and I headed back to that buried restaurant, where those eager young volunteers had been attempting the impossible with their shovels.
That day, I’d stood on top of the pile of silt to show how high it was for the camera, my head touching the light bulbs on the ceiling.
Now, the silt was gone.
I stood on the floor, staring up at the same light fixtures hanging overhead in disbelief.
They’d done it.
Down the road, we stopped by the 102-year-old Eskdale War Memorial Church. They’d managed to dig the silt out there too.
Linda Paterson, a board member on the church trust, told me some historical artefacts had been lost. The evidence was outside, a beloved organ lying mangled and muddy in the street.
But there was still plenty to save.
“I just think of the day that we have our first church service here, and the joy that will bring,” she told me then.
“That’s going to be the most amazing day.”
That day came ten months later, on a warm December night.
The pews were laid out for a carol service, as they had been so many times before. Each wooden seat had been carefully sanded to remove the stains of silt. The job took months, three pews at a time.
Soon, the building was echoing with a hundred voices singing The First Noel.
Among the parishioners was Rikki Reed Davis, a road worker who had, while the cyclone raged, spent hours clinging to a tree across from the church.
That day, he’d made a promise to come back to help clean up. And he did.
The valley is full of people with that kind of unusual strength. Much is still uncertain for the residents, and there is still plenty of silt to move. Many have been given buyout offers but, despite that, some have decided they want to stay.
Perhaps the greatest symbol of their resilience is the church. The building, which survived the 1931 Napier earthquake and the 1938 floods, will now endure.
And when the carol service began in December, a sound could be heard ringing right across the valley.
The church bells travelled to every corner of Eskdale, cutting through the quiet Hawke’s Bay countryside.
The silence, shattered.
“It was just so wonderful,” Paterson said in a phone call last week.
“Everyone was smiling, everyone was singing, everyone was hugging.”
How do you overcome the insurmountable?
“When you look ahead and you think you’ve got all this stuff to do, have a look behind,” she told me.
“See what you’ve already done, and you’ll be amazed.
“It makes you think, ‘I can carry on’.”
Thomas Mead was named Reporter of the Year at the 2023 New Zealand Television Awards, in part for his reporting on Cyclone Gabrielle.
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