Cyclone Gabrielle helicopter hero Cam Taylor on rescuing 150 people from a flooding ‘war zone’

He had no search and rescue experience and no pants on. But Cam Taylor had promised his wife he’d help save victims of Cyclone Gabrielle and he had access to a helicopter to do so. By the end of February 14, 2023, Taylor was a bonafide Hawke’s Bay hero. He hasn’t sought the limelight for it and it took time to convince him to share his story with the region and New Zealand, but it’s worth the wait. Hamish Bidwell reports.

Cam Taylor’s too proud to let you see him well up.

When the memories of Cyclone Gabrielle become too confronting, he turns his head away and takes a moment.

After a long pause, he opts to praise those he saved, not himself: “The will to live is amazing.”

In concert with pilot Geoff “Chook” Keighley, Taylor estimates he rescued “well over 100 or a 150″ flood-stricken folk from roofs and roof cavities when the biggest flood in modern times hit Hawke’s Bay one year ago on Wednesday.

Until Gabrielle last year, Cam Taylor wasn't in the search and rescue business. Photo / Paul Taylor

Only Taylor’s not in the search and rescue business.

He’s a fourth-generation orchardist with access to a Taylor Corp chopper and a roster of pilots, whose workdays usually consist of the aerial spraying of apple trees and ferrying equipment to remote blocks.

The Taylor Corp trees grow to 5 or 6 metres.

Taylor knew he was in trouble, at 5am last February 14, when he looked out the window of his former Waiohiki home and couldn’t see them.

Within four minutes of waking, Taylor and his family, including wife Tara, were in a vehicle and off in search of higher ground at Ormlie Lodge. From lapping at the door of the house, the water was about to engulf the bonnet of their four-wheel drive.

The lodge, which sits above the second fairway of the Napier Golf Club was the Taylors’ designated safe space, should a tsunami ever hit Hawke’s Bay.

But they never got beyond Links Rd in the cyclone.

A car in front of them was swept into a vineyard. Distraught residents were already on the roof of Silky Oak Chocolates.

“I said to Tara ‘it’s us first. I promise I’ll go back for the people in the car’,” Taylor said.

He did, of course. But not before grabbing whatever clothes and footwear - none of them his - that were lying around the Taylor Corp hangar.

“I can just remember we did the safety briefing before we were ready to go and Chook looks at me and I’m in my underpants, with a shirt on and bare feet,” said Taylor.

The pair had no idea what they’d find once they got in the air.

“We just made the decision that anyone with kids would be first,” Taylor said.

“The plan was always ‘we’re coming home’. It doesn’t matter what, we weren’t going to do stupid things. It was always coming home first.”

Cam Taylor's helicopter-view of the devastation caused by Cyclone Gabrielle.

Taylor’s memory is that he and Keighley were the first helicopter in the air that morning.

Radio communications - he’s not sure who from - advised them on two occasions to fly to Tūtira, the scene of a fatal landslide.

“I yelled and said ‘I’ve got my own community to save’. This was my community I’m flying over, so I knew these houses, I knew all the people.

“We run hundreds of hectares so I’m flying over my orchards and seeing trucks just get thrown around like toys.”

Taylor rescued 50 of his own RSE workers, then took people four at a time from roofs and dropped them at any house he could find that was sitting safely on a hill.

“We didn’t even talk to the owners of the house to say ‘how’re you going?’ We just made the decision that every house on the hills could take four people. If there’s two houses, we can put eight people there.”

The more-badly injured were taken to the aerodrome at Bridge Pa.

Typically, Keighley would land a skid on the roof of a house, Taylor would climb out and haul people aboard.

Taylor said the pair of them were unaware there were families huddled in roof cavities until he saw a makeshift flag, potentially a plastic bag, poking through one dwelling.

“The whole morning we’d just been searching on roofs.”

Cam Taylor needed an axe to rescue some people from their roof cavity.

Taylor says he’d “already seen people dead” by then and the memory of that, again, causes him to turn his head away.

Others were so exhausted he feared when he eventually got them out of a cavity and on to the roof that they would just roll off the roof and into the floodwaters.

One family were so far down in their house ceiling, and so swamped by floodwaters, that the pair of them flew away again to find a ladder among the debris to eventually get them out through the roof.

Taylor paid tribute to Keighley’s skill as a pilot to make it possible.

His biggest fear was blankets or clothing flying up and tangling in the tail rotor. But the only injury, in four days of rescuing people and their animals, was a nip on the finger from a cat in a cage.

“There are some people I’d like to catch up with. I still hold on to what they went through,” Taylor said.

“You talk to people and go ‘how did you get on your roof with your kids?’ And they climbed out the window, floated - because they were in the back-current of the house so the water wasn’t raging - held on to the guttering and just floated up and climbed that way.

“Then they’re actually holding on to satellite dishes and this is all in the dark. It wasn’t even light and you just can’t comprehend that.”

He estimates he’s met half of the people he did manage to pluck from on and under roofs and has sought out others to no avail.

“There was one old guy and it was a real steep roof, in Springfield,” said Taylor.

“He was on top of a porch and I couldn’t get to him, so I got dropped off at the top of the apex and came down.

“It’s amazing that I could get enough grip from the nailheads and I’m pulling up the old guy and he’s alive.

“Again, the will he had to live and the strength he had, it’s crazy.”

The shadow of the Taylor Corp helicopter flying over Cyclone Gabrielle floodwaters. Photo / Cam Taylor

You have to remember Taylor and Keighley were doing much of this in bad weather. They’d fly up valleys, do one rescue and see more people waving for help.

Try as they might, there were times when the visibility became too bad for them to return.

“It must’ve been a terrible feeling for them, because we got so close and couldn’t get back to them and, to be honest, that did play on my mind. But you can only do what you can do.”

At other times, full of adrenalin and a sense of mission, he wasn’t always aware of the condition people were in.

“Some people were a mess,” Taylor said.

“I learnt later that they were coming in and out of consciousness. I mean I picked up kids and put them in the chopper and had no idea.

“Some people, if I had time and I knew they needed it, I would put my arms around them and give them a cuddle. There were people that were in such a mess that the first thing you did was put an arm around them.

“You just had to read the situation and what they needed.”

All the while, he had little idea where or how his own family was and continued to fly over Taylor Corp orchards and packhouses that were under water or destroyed.

Eventually it became too dark to fly safely and he and Keighley landed in Taradale, where they’d heard Taylor’s wife and sons had evacuated to.

Cam Taylor knew most of the people in the houses he was flying over. Photo / Cam Taylor

“I remember the first night I came back, I was like ‘hell T [Tara], this is just a war zone’ and I just cramped in my whole body because I hadn’t eaten or drank anything and I couldn’t move.”

Nor could - or would - he sleep for another “three or four days”.

With the flood water having receded, February 15 was spent crawling through silt to check whether houses might be occupied.

Cyclone Gabrielle left orchards like this almost completely submerged.

He and Keighley flew for two more days, largely dropping generators and supplies to isolated farmers, until eventually being grounded.

It was then time to take stock of what had happened to Taylor Corp and their fellow growers.

“Straight away, after we stopped flying, that’s when I started lobbying. Get the MPs in the air, fly them around, show them the devastation,” said Taylor.

“So, for months afterwards, I was just lobbying to get whatever I could for the horticultural industry.

“We’re a large family grower and money’s not free. It has to come from somewhere.

“We’ve got a wage bill in the hundreds of thousands a week and that was our big thing - do you carry on?

“But we’ve got hundreds of families that are dependent on us and that was a big thing that plays on your mind. It’s not just our mouths we’re feeding, it’s hundreds.

“I don’t own all the land. I’m leasing off other families and some of them are old and in their 80s and 90s. I can’t walk off the land because their only income is my rent.”

Silt was cleared off blocks for months, but wasn’t enough to save 15 per cent of Taylor Corp’s tree stock. Others fruited this season and promptly died.

Taylor’s had insurance battles to get a payout on his own flood-destroyed home, but at least there are signs of recovery at Taylor Corp’s Franklin Rd premises.

The company’s two-year-old packhouse, having had 26 million litres of mud sucked out of it, has been rebuilt and refitted and will officially reopen on February 16.

It might take decades to recoup the millions of dollars in cyclone-related losses, but the packhouse represents an important milestone.

As for February 14, and the part he played, Taylor’s still determined to suggest it’s what anyone would do.

“There were a lot of heroes out there in jet skis and trucks and boats and we just happened to have a helicopter at the time.”

Hamish Bidwell joined Hawke’s Bay Today in 2022 and works out of the Hastings newsroom.