Prime Minister Chris Hipkins spoke to the media after a helicopter fly-over to survey the damage from last night's flooding.
Video / NZ Herald / Pool Footage
OPINION:
I spent Friday night “sheltering in place” at the Ahuroa Volunteer Fire Service’s HQ.
Along with about 50 others, we could go neither forward along the road, or return the way we came, as flood waters quickly overcame the roads around us.
I had set off to Paparoa to get ready for the arrival of Auckland friends keen to watch the bathtub race, which is part of a nearby regatta.
An hour north out of Auckland, I was diverted before the Dome Valley across to State Highway 16 via Kaipara Flats. A landslide had closed the road a few minutes before I arrived.
The rains left roads and reserves flood-filled. Photo / Matt Martel
But it quickly became obvious that the weather was worse than predicted and rising waters made many roads impassable. At Kaipara Flats township I joined a joyously happy drunk tradie as we watched cars and utes try to get under a flooded rail bridge, and most succeeded. We turned around as many small cars as we could, with a wave and a toast of Lion Red.
A woman in a Tesla had a go at me because she didn’t want to hear how dangerous it was.
A local told me about a back road that was still passable, and off I went.
After a couple of kilometres, I met an old Holden coming the other way. The driver stopped and I told him the road ahead was okay. He said I was heading into roads that were a bit rough, but should be fine. I am now convinced he was taking the piss.
The rain smashed down and there was flooding on either side of the road, and a bit of water on it, though nothing crazy.
But it seemed with each new valley, the water got deeper and deeper.
Parts of a number of roads were submerged following the deluge. Photo / Matt Martel
Eventually, I caught up to a white Fiat 500 and I figured anything it could do, I could follow in my larger and more powerful BMW 330. The Fiat would be my canary in the coal mine. I felt a bit guilty about this, but too bad.
After a while, it occurred to me that the owner might be an over-confident fool. I - perhaps mistakenly - dismissed that thought.
The water was getting deeper. First, it was up to the base of the tyres, then more and more, but still the Fiat forwarded on so I lurked in its rearview mirror.
After a crossing so deep that water came over my windscreen, I decided to stop following the Fiat so closely. My car agreed, sputtering as it hobbled forward, with steam everywhere.
A drivetrain warning light came on. I realised I was the over-confident fool.
By this stage, I’d gone through about five decent-sized floods. The car wanted a break.
A Jeep stopped to offer assistance, but I bravely said I’d be okay.
Water levels have been significantly high. Photo / Matt Martel
That was to be a common theme of the next 15 hours – many, many people helping each other, with humour and kindness.
I pushed on and the car slowly recovered.
Flooding by Pukekohe Park raceway.
Twenty minutes of driving later, I reached Ahuroa. This involved driving through more deep water, but I had no choice. There was no way to go back and State Highway 16 was not far ahead.
At the end of that valley, a queue of cars waited. I pulled into a gravel yard, knowing the car could handle no more. The cars were stopped at the deepest water I had seen yet. It would have been waist-high and rising.
It was a relief to give up.
Only one vehicle made it through – the guy in the Jeep who’d offered to help. Onlookers were stunned he made it.
I returned to wait in my car, but a guy in a ute pulled up a few minutes later to tell me the local fire station had been opened up. Its car park filled with cars, vans and utes.
The firefighter helping us, Tom Brady, was super friendly and had a big box of gluten-free sausages from his freezer. It turns out he was a Qantas pilot whose brother owns the neighbouring farm.
We all gathered what food we had from our vehicles and started telling our stories. They were all in the same vein – people wanting to get home to family, attend birthdays, a wedding or other events. Everyone was surprised by the flooding.
In one of the world’s most middle-class things ever, I was able to offer up a large organic camembert, an antipasto platter and a rotisserie chicken.
To add to my shame, I was dressed for work in a bright spotted shirt from Strangely Normal and brown dress shoes. Everyone else was pretty much in sport casual or tradie shorts or jeans. Townie.
Luckily I was able to go for a walk during a break in the weather and get saturated enough to need to change into shorts and a grey T-shirt.
Tom cooked dozens of sausages for dinner and I prepped the antipasto and made a Greek salad.
All the talk was of rumours about how long we’d be stuck. There was talk of the roads being impassable for days, and of a helicopter dropping supplies to us the next day. It was a bit scary.
And all the while, the crew and fire engine were away helping people. They’d left hours earlier to help someone with a flooded house, but were now on the wrong side of the deepest water, so worked all night trying to help people down on State Highway 16. I am in awe of them.
As the night progressed, people offered rollup camping mats to the older people, blankets to the young. The TV was rigged to show Netflix.
The station comprised of a garage for two trucks, and then a large rear lounge and kitchen where we could all hang out. A covered balcony at the back provided shelter and communal space.
The lounge had a kitchen and a well-stocked bar, which we were told not to open under fear of death and head office.
But as the night wore on a bottle of vodka was produced, and then a bottle of excellent homemade whisky. Some warm beers were found.
By midnight a lot of us were asleep – particularly those lucky enough to have grown up sleeping on marae, meaning they were more used to sleeping with 50 other people in the room. (I grew up spending a lot of weekends on marae, but the trick to getting to sleep evaded me then and now.)
About 1am, 4WDs started driving past. Somehow they had made it from Warkworth. We flagged a driver down and he told us it was now possible to get back to Warkworth in a high-axle vehicle. None of us were brave enough to do that, plus, as one person noted, “we’d all had a bit too much orange juice to drive”.
Flooded roads made it hard for most cars to drive through on Friday and Saturday. Photo / Matt Martel
Fifteen minutes later, a Fulton Hogan truck drove slowly along, leading about 20 cars behind it. The driver told me his logbook hours were long gone and he probably wasn’t still getting paid but he and his two crew were doing what they could to get the road open and to help people.
We figured they’d all drive down to the deepest ford and then turn around, but only about half did. The water was dropping already.
By 2.30am, exhaustion had taken over. We all went off to our cars to try to sleep, most of us underneath borrowed firefighter jackets which act surprisingly well as duvets.
At 6am we were mostly up and the drivers in cars going past said it was easy enough to get back to Warkworth, and maybe down to Auckland, but there was no way north.
My car’s drivetrain warning light had stopped so I figured something must have dried out.
I headed to Warkworth, which was only eventful for the number of dead vehicles littering the road. I passed a BMW that was the same model and year as my own, stopped in the middle of the road, which had previously been flooded. I said a little prayer.
Back in Warkworth, the people I spoke to had the same half-facts and misinformation as myself.
Traffic going south was blocked at the service station, so I called in for petrol and was annoyed to find they had jacked up the price of petrol to take advantage of the crisis.
I couldn’t get south home to Auckland, and Dome Valley heading north was either shut (according to Waka Kotahi, which should know), or open, according to the locals.
Everyone was astounded that even with no viable route south that the completed Puhoi-Warkworth motorway hadn’t been opened. Rumour was that cars had used it overnight.
It seemed only right to drive over to Matakana to see if the market was open and to get a bacon and egg buttie.
After that, I realised I could probably get to Leigh and then from there to Wellsford. That meant I could get to my destination up north.
I was nearly wrong. The road was in parts badly damaged, but passable, until about 5km from Wellsford where a 100m long river flowed from a paddock into a stream. I stopped.
I watched 4WDs get through and thought it would be wrong to call upon my car to yet again play act as a boat. But then someone in a Honda Civic did it and I thought it would just be embarrassing for my car if I didn’t try.
The car agreed and made a fine job of the crossing. All up, the only damage to it was the water had been strong enough to rip off the front number plate. My brother in Auckland wasn’t so lucky, it looks like his car may be a flood-damaged write-off.
Closer to Wellsford, on a low bend, I saw three distraught people looking at what I guessed was a destroyed Tesla as a local who must have given them a lift looked on incredulously.
On reflection, what could have been a cold, wet night had become a good experience, meeting lots of great people, and being reminded again what heroes our rural volunteer firefighters are.
I am now aware of how lucky we had been to make it to the fire station. One house further along the road apparently had 25 people sheltering in it, and back in Auckland the destruction was ruining houses and costing lives.
