Trees that were hundreds of metres up the mountain are now embedded in the slip, poking in and out of the rubble at all sorts of unnatural angles besides the Fosters' house.
But the lead-up to the massive slip was deceptively quiet.
“The neighbour came up the drive and said ‘you've got to get out, you've got to get out' and we said ‘what for?'” Mrs Foster said.
“Then we came round the back of the house and said ‘oh my goodness'. It was just after six o'clock at night. If it was at night-time it would have been a lot more scary.”
Mr Foster said all they had left to do was stand and watch as the huge mass of earth slowly moved down the waterlogged mountain beside them.
“We were getting a bit concerned . . . it wasn't until it started hooking into these trees. It's hard to describe. There's a huge bank down there — that's what saved us. It was like 45 degrees,.
“ I was on the barbecue cooking up dinner. It was about 6.15 and you could just hear all this bang crash, bang, and that was all the trees getting demolished.”
Mrs Foster described the initial sounds as: “a cracking noise like matchsticks breaking. We saw the earth starting to come down and we thought ‘something's not right'.”
The slip destroyed one of the Fosters' water tanks and concrete slabs surrounding it into a mound of earth that leaves a metre of space around one side of their house.
While The Herald was speaking to the Fosters, a Gisborne District Council building inspector walked around the back field and announced the house was now red-stickered.
The Fosters had just been commenting on how no one from Civil Defence or the Gisborne District Council had come to visit them since Tuesday when floods from the overnight downpour of Cyclone Gabrielle was causing havoc in the area south of Gisborne.
The inspector said this was “definitely” the largest slip from Cyclone Gabrielle in the Gisborne region.
“It is what we'd class as being an imminent risk which technically means in theory the house is red-stickered,” he said.
“Essentially, if it failed again, and we don't know when, it could take out the house. You're extremely lucky.”
The inspector said “imminent risk” from a slip is classified as anything within eight metres of a property or structure.
“You've probably got the biggest new landslide in the district from this event.
“When you're flying over it, it's what we call a debris flow. so it actually has a lot of moisture in it and that would act as a bulldozer if it hit your house.”
He was exactly optimistic about the Fosters having a smooth interaction with the the EQC (Earthquake Commission) — a crown entity providing home insurance to help communities get their lives back on track after a natural disaster.
“The insurance company does all the handling with EQC now. I can tell you that it's a pain in the arse. We find that it doesn't work as well as what it used to in the past,” he said to the Fosters.
Surprised at this, Mrs Foser said: “Oh, OK, I thought it was meant to streamline things and make it easier.”
The inspector repled: “For EQC it does but for the people that it's actually affected, no, because there are just more people involved.”
The Fosters had to find new accommodation until the future safety of their house was determined.
The council inspector said a berm of some sort may have to be erected beside their property, or the house actually moved further up the hill.
“I thought we were OK,” Mrs Foster Said. “I thought it was just a matter of getting some earthworks to move it over there, and we would be fine . . . goodness.”
Pointing to the line of trees which had directed the slip away from their property slightly, she said: “You're dead right, they saved us”.
