Cyclone Gabrielle: Rural chaos with crops ruined and dairy farms dumping milk as fresh evacuation call goes out in Dargaville

Adam Pierce and Zena Calvert on the Pierce family dairy farm in Waihue Valley, north of Dargaville. Photo / David Fisher

Dargaville is bracing for a fresh surge of floodwater which emergency services have been told will likely breach the sea wall protecting the Northland town.

Fire and Emergency NZ northland district manager Wipari Henwood said expert hydrologist advice was that a surge of water was coming down Wairoa River from Tangowahine, arriving as the high tide was beginning to build.

Henwood said the surge was estimated to be 5.6 metres which would breach the sea wall. He said residents alongside the river were being evacuated and town centre businesses had been asked to sandbag their shops and leave.

Henwood said a second surge was also expected overnight from the Mangalahia River although estimates were less precise in that case.

Dargaville’s Melissa Birt, 53, was leaving her home with the assistance of daughter Dianne Gavin, 34, after a visit from emergency officials.

“We were doorknocked about (5pm) because the Tangowahine banks had collapsed and there was an extremely big amount of water coming our way and we should evacuate.”

She said the river level - across SH12 from her bungalow home - “has risen really really fast in the last couple of hours”.

Many residents along the waterfront have already left their homes after rapidly rising - later receding - water levels. The town centre is awash with sandbags in preparation for the river overflowing.

When the rain and the wind died down, the problems were only just beginning on the Pierce dairy farm north of Dargaville.

For all the chaos of a cyclone, the cows still need to be milked. The farmers - like thousands of other people across the North - are without power and electricity is needed to milk the cows.

“Until power comes back on, you do the best you can do,” says Murray Pierce, 62, of the Waihue Valley. “You’ve got f***all choice.”

The electricity generator powering the milk shed is chugging away as the 300 cows on the farm move through. It arrived on Tuesday at the point the udders were swollen with the need for milking.

If the cows aren’t milked, they stop producing and that ends a farm’s earnings for the season. So they are milked even though the tankers which cart the milk away can’t get through.

“We’re dumping all the milk because we have to,” says Pierce’s son Adam, 25. His partner Zena Calvert, 30, adds: “It’s ruined a lot of people’s financial year. You just have to carry it. You can’t insure against the weather.”

All around Dargaville are similar stories of the enormous spanner Cyclone Gabrielle has thrown into the works of the nation’s primary production engine rooms. Paddock after paddock of crops sit sodden in water, some ruined by the water and others simply washed away.

Careful seasonal preparation of silage by farmers must now seem like wasted effort. The big green bales were swept away by torrents and scattered, soaked and ruined.

Silage bales were soaked and scattered as the cyclone swept through. Photo / David Fisher

The weather tore up the cattle races - the pathways used by cows to milking - and the wet ground raises risks of damaging their hooves.

“We’re farmers. We just get on with it. You don’t have much choice - you just do the best you can.”

At the Pierces, great plantations of pine can be seen on the range to the North. That, they believe, was the source of the tree trunks and other debris that ripped fences from the ground and choked rivers and streams.

“They’ve all got nice square ends,” says Murray Pierce, pointing to the neat chainsaw cuts, “so they didn’t get ripped out (by the weather).”

The generator will be passed to another farm when the Pierce herd is milked, and then to another. With it goes the electrician needed to rig it to the milking sheds.

As the Herald visited farms around Dargaville, there were stories of farmers racing to Auckland to buy generators at $14,000 in the desperate hope it could be rigged up to a milking shed and save a herd’s productivity.

A group of Sydney mates on a road trip came unstuck after driving through a flooded section of SH12. Photo / David Fisher

The town and surrounding areas have yet to relax. Floodwaters have yet to recede and with much of the area’s waterways connected to Kaipara Harbour, the incoming high tide late afternoon brought a fresh round of evacuations.

On State Highway 12, heading North, significant sections of the road are still underwater. John Gagen, 65, and a carload of mates from Sydney were regretting their decision to push through one stretch. Their vehicle shuddered to a halt on the far side and couldn’t be coaxed back to life.

A bit down the road, Lillian Rahui, 72, has one of the larger sections of submerged highway just beyond her front gate. Despite warnings not to do so, and the obvious risks, car after car has risked the run and become stranded, needing a tow out.

Lillian Rahui with one of a number of flooded sections of SH12 behind her. Photo / David Fisher

“Daredevils,” she calls them, although says her partner used some less flattering words when he was hauling the last car out.

“I don’t think a lot of people thought it was going to be this bad,” she says.

One older Dargaville resident was still of the view it wouldn’t get any worse. Twice officials had tried to evacuate him from his riverside home and twice he had refused. One stood there and read him the legislation empowering a forced removal, which he listened to carefully and then refused to comply.

“There’s a very fine line between stupid and stubborn,” he says.

Three evacuation centres were set up and took in about 120 people over Monday night and through to Tuesday. “People coming in were pretty shocked. They’d been woken by sirens and told ‘you need to evacuate’,” says Amanda Bennett, who was running the centre at the Holy Trinity Anglican Church.

One of those people was Tui Lowe, 66, with her dog Zealand. She sat cradling a cushion gifted by grandchildren carrying images of her family. “Even the one who hasn’t been born,” she says, pointing at the foetal scan image imprinted on the cushion.

Tui Lowe with Zealand at the Holy Trinity Church evacuation centre in Dargaville. Photo / David Fisher

The dawn arrival of emergency evacuation services trumped Lowe’s plan. “I was going to blow up the airbed, tie the dog to it and away you go.”

Along with the reality of today, there’s many looking at the failures of yesterday and the promise of tomorrow.

Tony and Judith Wright live on an acre to the east of Ruawai. Their home appears as if it is an island in a vast sea, although it was not flooded.

Tony Wright reckons the stopbank work completed decades ago needed upgrading long before the cyclone hit. “I’ve been here 25 years and in that time they’ve only done a little bit of work on the stopbanks.”

On the Dargaville floodplain east of Ruawai is the home of Tony and Judith Wright which, like many, is an island in a new sea. Photo / David Fisher

As they sat and watched the weather strike, Wright says the water rose to the height of the stopbank - and was then pushed over by the strong winds.

In town, Alan Hobson also narrowly missed having his home and workshop flooded. Hobson, 82, has lived his entire life in Dargaville and says he’s never seen such flooding.

“There’s a lot more infrastructure needed. It will never happen because there’s not enough money. And it’s the people’s fault because they don’t like paying for it. Nobody likes to pay rates.”