Reduced to uncertainty and disbelief

A nightmare confronts DAVID PASSEY at the property his family have farmed for 100 years


I was returning home, but it wasn't the kind of return I could have imagined even in my darkest hours.

After three years in Stockholm, I was driving south from Auckland to the farm where I was born, braced for scenes of devastation.

I had learned by phone that the storms that ravaged the lower North Island this week had torn at the heart of our Manawatu family farm.

Trying to build a picture in my mind's eye had been nigh impossible. All I could conjure was the tranquil beauty of a river valley under the Ruahine Ranges.

I had two questions: what would I see? And what would I feel?

I knew it was bad. I had heard my father's descriptions, my mother's tears. But how bad?

In bare feet, with darkness looming and more storms threatening, I forded the creek that ran through the smashed-up, broken-down road just kilometres from home.

Brother Ian, a picture of stoic calm, picked me up on the other side.

Driving to the top of the farm was the stuff of nightmares.

Strewn across hectares of the farm were literally hundreds of stranded trees, beached on endless sand, silt, mud, gravel and debris up to more than a metre deep.

Some of the farm was gone. The river - swollen, torrential and angry - had exploded on to the property on Sunday night, blasting from one end to the other. It had flooded sheds, torn up the road, wasted grasslands and taken areas considered un-floodable.

It was still ripping huge holes and flooding across the flats, carving the farm in two as the rain fell. Landslide upon landslide now scarred the hillside above the houses and the flats.

"It looks like something out of Jurassic Park," I said. Ian nodded.

The next day, I walked around the farm with my 70-year-old father, Barrie Passey. He has lived and worked all his life on this land, land in the family four generations and for 100 years. He's seen floods here, but nothing remotely like this.

"They use the words absolute devastation to describe it," he said, "and that'd be right."

The 120ha farm has never been a big money earner. Its value lies in the 80ha dairy unit. Almost half of that 80ha is under silt and gravel, the river still flowing through it and over it.

My father says the farm's viability is under threat. Until the river is rerouted it's highly vulnerable to further extensive damage. First-guess estimates for that job range up to six figures. Clean-up costs could be upwards of $100,000 to return the property to its best condition. Then there's lost production.

However, as we talk, the mood here is remarkably pragmatic. But in snatched moments, the full scale of the drama unfolds.

I ask my father how he feels about the farm turning 100 years old next year.

"Sometimes you get beyond thinking about how much work has gone into this, of thinking how long it has been with us," he said. "You look at it and just wonder if the damn thing's worth it.

"I feel sorry for Ian [who share-milks on the farm]."

He says they could get together enough money to buy a house in town and sell what is left of the farm for a lifestyle block. However, my father says they will not do that, but " my life's work, my life's investment, has been hugely lost".