Understandably, when the lights flicked off, everyone in Hawke’s Bay immediately moved from power sources to their phones, from their wifi to their 5G and 4G networks. They needed to know what was happening.
A number of residents along Links Road at Waiohiki, near Napier, were rescued today. Photo / Paul Taylor
Soon the networks were failing. We were down to 3G and crawling. Social media posts were all but impossible.
The pictures and videos that people needed to see to warn them were trapped on individual phones and cameras, unable to be shared.
And then, an hour or so later, the mobile networks seemed to crash completely.
Between 10am and noon, it was impossible to make a single call from my outpost in Havelock North. One text went through. A miracle call went through at 12.15pm and cut out after 30 seconds.
Taradale needed to be evacuated and no one could tell them about it. So, too, the poor people in Esk Valley, and Mt Herbert in Central Hawke’s Bay.
There were other communities too, no doubt, but at 12.30pm (the time I wrote this sentence) one of the most informed people in Hawke’s Bay (me, I think) had absolutely no idea what was going on.
A number of residents along Links Road at Waiohiki, near Napier, were rescued via IRB and jet skis. Photo / Paul Taylor
After I wrote the line above I decided I had to drive to get informed. I again tried the office in Hastings. I couldn’t get in (no power) but I could get phone calls from the carpark - sort of. Most cut out.
I followed a sign on a door to the Hastings Sports Centre - it had been set up as a hub for evacuees - in the hope of finding some way to get internet.
There were dozens, maybe hundreds there. There were sausages. There were people lying on mats in the gymnasium in the middle of the day, asleep. The Sikh community dropped off food.
The closest I got to being able to do something useful was when Ruth from Pakowhai saw my phone charger.
She was barefoot, wide-eyed, and exhausted. She told me her phone was flat. She said she’d been awoken in the middle of the night to floodwaters entering her home.
She escaped in waist-deep waters with nothing - nothing but her flat phone.
We sat next to the generator and her phone turned on. She tried to send messages to those she loved. I hope they got through.
After a trip to Civil Defence, we got some of the Hastings team together to korero. But we had limited internet and dubious communications.
I found a landline phone and got through to our Napier office, where the team could operate due to a generator.
There were tired people on the other end of the line in that newsroom, brave people, heroic people. Some of them can’t get back to their homes tonight.
One stopped reporting today to pull a pair back from Marine Parade’s huge waves. From Hastings, it’s hard to fathom the things they’ve seen today.
There will be time to reflect and learn from this after it is all over, but as I wait for communications to resume (again I wrote this line just after 12.30pm today) I have had time to reflect in the midst of a massive natural disaster.
The Tutaekuri River and Ngaruroro Rivers are the reason that Hawke’s Bay has two cities. They quite literally divide Napier and Hastings. Always have, though not like this.
But they will unite us too. We know disasters here, and we know how to recover.
The 1931 earthquake shaped this region in its pain and so, too, will Cyclone Gabrielle. The flood plains that we’ve expanded onto too much (some of them created with that earthquake’s help) have bitten us.
Reporter Martha and friends are in Minginui introducing us to their favourite four-legged neighbours, wild but friendly horses that have had free reign of the place since 1870.
