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With a massive slip blocking the road in front of him and with heavy rain bearing down, truck driver John Milne decided to park up and wait out the cyclone in his cab until morning.
Then the truck moved.
“I turned the lights on and there was about five foot(1.5m) of water,” the 59-year-old told Stuff.
“By the time I put my boots and Swanndri on, it had come back up to the door.”
The experienced truckie had been on his way from Gisborne to Hawke’s Bay, on State Highway 2, late on Monday afternoon to deliver a load of squash.
When he left Gisborne, it was raining - but nothing that would worry anyone at that point, he told the publication.
John Milne's truck was photographed by the NZ Defence Force on February 16. Photo / NZDF
But by 7pm, things were about to turn to custard on the Napier-Wairoa Rd and Milne was forced to get out of his truck in a bid to get to safety.
For the next three hours or so, he would be forced to make snap decisions that would ultimately decide whether or not he would be alive by the end of the night.
“There was no road, basically. [I was] climbing through trees, over slips, through water. I got tipped up and dragged across the road for about 20ft before I could get my feet back up.”
At one point, he came across a stream that had what appeared to be a rock the size of a dinner table on it.
He waited for that to “bugger off” before getting into the water.
After navigating and fighting his way through for about 2km, he came across the vehicle of two electrical workmen he had seen earlier in the evening and who had been stopped by a slip near the Aropaoanui River.
There, Milne and the two Unison workers waited until morning before going up a hill where they were eventually rescued by locals.
On describing what he went through, Milne - who had been in the region when Cyclone Bola caused massive damage in 1988 - said this was “one hundred times worse” than that cyclone system.
“I don’t ever, ever want to repeat that - at all.”
