A volunteer helps Jen Yule take destroyed furniture from her and her husband Dave's flooded Twyford property in the week after Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo / Paul Taylor
A volunteer helps Jen Yule take destroyed furniture from her and her husband Dave's flooded Twyford property in the week after Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo / Paul Taylor
More cyclone-hit property owners have been given the green light to rebuild but one Twyford couple says they do not feel safe returning.
Dave and Jen Yule were surprised when Hastings District Council told them the stop banks behind their property had been repaired to a pre-cyclone standardand it was safe to rebuild.
They have been living in a Te Awanga rental since flood waters over a metre and a half high in Twyford wrecked the house and property that had been in Dave’s family for over 100 years.
Hawke’s Bay Regional Council announced the Twyford and Moteo areas on the Heretaunga Plain had officially moved from category 2C to category 1.
“The release of some Category 2C properties is a gradual process based on confidence in stop bank breach repairs have returned the stop banks on parts of the Tūtaekurī and Ngaruroro rivers to pre-cyclone status of 1:100 year (or a 1 per cent chance of being exceeded in any given year),” the Regional Council said in a statement.
Jen said although some work had been done, flood damage could still be seen on the stop bank near their home months after the cyclone.
“There are still holes right behind our house,” Jen said.
“The water had nowhere to go so the stop bank, even when it is repaired, will not save [rebuilt] properties.”
However, a Regional Council spokesman said in a statement building flood defences back to the standard they were before Cyclone Gabrielle was only the first of three phases in post-flood repairs and the next two phases would see improvements and future resilience.
He said flood modelling being completed by Niwa will determine a new Annual Exceedance Probability (AEP), or the chance of certain levels of flooding.
The second phase will see sections of the stop bank network rebuilt to handle a one per cent AEP flood, which has a 1 per cent chance to happen each year.
“These works will include stop bank modifications, riverbed surveys, gravel management and any other works deemed necessary,” the spokesman said.
“The third phase is to reconfigure the schemes to ensure resilience to future over-design events similar to Cyclone Gabrielle.”
He said some stop banks have been grassed and others are covered in a plastic material until spring.
“In some locations new stop banks have been vandalised by 4WD and motorbikes and this damage will be repaired,” he said.
“It is possible that some superficial damage may occur to the topsoil while grass cover established, however the stop bank is still deemed adequate and minor issues will be repaired as part of ongoing maintenance.”
Works on the stop bank along the Ngāruroro River behind the Yules' Twyford property, ongoing five months after Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo / Dave Yule
Dave said he appreciated there would be further work done, but he felt that information had not been communicated to residents well enough by HDC and the Regional Council when they were informed of the flood risk category change.
He has lived on his family’s land his entire life, including through Cyclone Bola, but he said he was ready to leave it behind with the flood risk.
He said they felt trapped in limbo since they were locked into rebuilding by their insurance policy and could not just take a payout to move somewhere else.
He said he understood some had no alternative but to rebuild on the land due to not having the resources to move and the limitations of insurance coverage policy.
“But I think to just blanket encourage everyone to just rebuild, it just doesn’t fit with the narrative that we need to be putting more thought into where we build on these flood plains,” Dave said.
The Yules said that the flood risk to the area had increased when the expressway was built years ago, as part of the Ngaruroro River was artificially narrowed to shorten the span the bridge had to cross.
“The water goes from a very wide river, stop bank to stop bank, to being narrowed down to go under the bridge,” Jen said.
She said the only reason the flooding was not worse at their property was because the stop bank breached at Hill Rd before it could over top where they were.
“There is no way lives are going to be safe.”
James Pocock joined Hawke’s Bay Today in 2021 and writes breaking news and features, with a focus on environment, local government and post-cyclone issues in the region. He has a keen interest in finding the bigger picture in research and making it more accessible to audiences. He lives in Napier. james.pocock@nzme.co.nz
