Shaun Riley provides timely presentation on 1981 Waipapa floods at Kerikeri’s Proctor Library

Kaikohe's Shaun Riley spoke recently about the "worst flood in memory", which hit Waipapa and Kerikeri on March 19-20, 1981.

A well-known Kaikohe local has shared his experience helping a fellow farmer during Kerikeri District’s “worst flood in memory”.

Former dairy farmer and Federated Farmers member Shaun Riley hosted a presentation about the unprecedented 1981 Waipapa floods at Kerikeri’s Proctor Library recently.

Around 20 people attended Riley’s talk, which recalled the events of March 19-20, 1981 that sent the district into a state of emergency.

Several houses were damaged as a result of the flood and one person was killed.

Riley said he would never forget the day he was asked to help Waipapa sheep farmer Jack Abbott, whose property had been inundated with floodwater.

“About a dozen of us from Federated Farmers went over to help Jack Abbott, whose property was the worst-hit out of everyone,” Riley said.

“He didn’t know what to do, and I suppose in a situation like that, you’re just struck dumb.

“All of his sheep got swept away, so we went over there and helped rebuild a mile of fencing on his farm.”

Riley said Abbott wasn’t the only farmer who’d suffered through the floods, with local orchards wiped out “for around 20 years” and another woman having to endure the cries of her drowning sheep.

He also told of a farm dog that narrowly escaped with its life thanks to it poking its nose through the kennel’s wire netting as it was submerged in the floodwater.

Both Kerikeri’s Kemp House (built in 1822) and the neighbouring Stone Store were severely damaged by the 1981 flooding and cost more than $1 million to repair.

A swollen Kerikeri River races past two of New Zealand's oldest buildings, Kemp House and the Stone Store.

During heavy rain, flood debris came down the river and was caught in the narrow bridge across the nearby road, effectively damming the floodwaters around the historic precinct.

According to National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) hyrdologist Christian Zammit, this was due to very heavy rainfall over the night of March 19-20 in Kerikeri .

“The nearby Waipapa River was in flood too, but that was said to have been a ‘mean’ annual flood level, so not extreme,” Zammit said.

“The Hydrology Centre [preceding Niwa] produced a flood forecasting system in 1989 for the Historic Places Trust to warn of future flooding of Kemp House.”

Zammit said the chance of another major flood in the area was not unlikely based on current IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) climate projections associated with extreme weather events.

He said Niwa’s work with HIRDS (High-Intensity Rainfall Design System) had shown an increase in precipitation intensity by at least 7 per cent per degree change and that temperatures would continue to climb.

“Analysis of a large ensemble of GCM [General Circulation Models] that run at a coarse scale [such as Weather at Home] indicate an increase in frequency rather than a decrease, but it is a coarse scale and might not represent the exact situation.”