Cyclone Gabrielle: In Pākowhai, Ruth’s flooded home was just the beginning of a political ‘rollercoaster’

Properties on Gilligan Rd, Pākōwhai, in the immediate aftermath of the cyclone.

Ruth Spittle ran into Hawke’s Bay Today editor Chris Hyde almost immediately after escaping the floodwaters that surged through her Pākōwhai property on February 14, 2023. On that day, she needed a phone charger to text her loved ones and tell them she’d made it out alive. A year on she needs someone, anyone, to help her keep her home.

It’s been the best season for growing sunflowers and pumpkins in living memory in Pākōwhai.

A year ago, Cyclone Gabrielle turned the farming and lifestyle community outside Hastings into an ocean as much as 6 metres deep.

Entire homes were swallowed under a flood that travelled in all different directions, first downstream from a Links Rd breach of the Tūtaekuri River stopbank, then across from breaks in the Ngarurōrō's banks.

Ruth Spittle believes the water then flowed, for good measure, back towards her Gilligan Rd home again when debris piled up on the downstream railway bridge.

Her theory is backed by some hard evidence - some of her husband Malcolm Guthrie’s sunflowers were swept into an upstream tree and stayed there, many metres above the ground. Strange currents were at work that day.

Ruth Spittle with the sunflowers she and husband Malcolm Guthrie grew at their Pākōwhai property. Photo / Chris Hyde

When the water receded, the silt it left behind was a nightmare to move from roads and inside homes, but a joy for growing vegetables. The fresh cucumbers in the front garden a year on are delicious.

Ruth knows these fertile soils better than most. She’s lived on them for 20 years and Malcolm’s lived in Pākōwhai all his life before February 14, 2023.

They’d grown $40,000 of sweetcorn in the paddock over from them, ready to pick the very day of the cyclone.

Before February 14, the land had blessed them, and so in theory, the pair would like to stay on these soils if they can.

But their home was late last year finally zoned Category 3 after an arduous process where they were moved in and out of the red zone - one time on the same day when an incorrect email was sent to them by Hawke’s Bay Regional Council.

Ruth moves her hand around like a rolling wave: “We’ve been treated like we’re on a little rollercoaster - up and down and up and down.”

The couple now live in the suburb of Parklands in Napier. The strain of living in hotels and temporary accommodation took its toll and in July they “very reluctantly” spent their retirement savings just to get a permanent roof over their heads.

But Ruth still holds out hope for her completely stripped back home. She says it’s watertight and fit for living, if they’d just be allowed to renovate it to live in it.

“It’s just illogical, we can’t understand it,” she said of the voluntary buyout that she doesn’t feel is voluntary at all.

“There was no loss of life in Pākōwhai. This is a floodplain. We all accept it.

“And what’s happened over the years is that it’s flooded and people just get back and clean up their houses and live here again.

“You look at Fernie Station and all those wooden houses that have been there for hundreds of years and it makes you think, why do we have to go now?

“Our house and these houses are still compliant. We have treated timber, double glazing, and it just seems such a waste to just knock them down.”

She feels the category decisions in Pākōwhai and its surrounds have been political from the start.

It means that what she’s been clinging to is an idea backed by former National Party cyclone recovery spokesman Chris Penk in the late stages of the campaign trail in 2023.

Category 2W.

The non-existent category, pushed for publicly by Eskdale’s Dan Gale, works on the idea that people can move back, provided they can prove they have a robust and effective flood warning system to help them know when to leave in an emergency.

“The concept of 2W works because we want to understand if people can be made safe using the right warnings, then they should be allowed to remain in place,” Penk said when the Government was pushing for votes in October.

Chris Penk with now MPs Katie Nimon (left), and Catherine Wedd on the campaign trail in Hawke's Bay. Photo / Warren Buckland

But the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council said it didn’t fit the framework. It’s repeatedly said that the reason the homes are in category 3 is because there is a risk to life in allowing people to stay.

And it seems, now the Government is in power, it agrees with the council.

Minister for Emergency Management and Recovery Mark Mitchell told Hawke’s Bay Today he understood a 2W (early warning system) cyclone category was raised as a possibility at a public meeting last year, but the categorisation policy - and the decisions that come from it - sit with respective councils.

“Ministers are not considering a new 2W categorisation. The categorisation policy has been in place now for several months and the Government has no further role...

“The Government’s focus is on supporting councils to make the decisions needed on the current categorisation framework which is one that the Government has provided significant funding for.

“What we want to see is greater certainty for people in severely affected properties as quickly as possible. A change to the categorisation policy at this late stage would significantly slow recovery down.”

Ruth acknowledges she was fortunate she and her husband had a strong enough vehicle to leave when waters were hip height. Even then the struggle to open the gate against the current almost overwhelmed her.

One of the last things the pair did before they left was put their cat in the top level of their 5-metre tall implement shed. He was found in the eaves several days later, alive.

She says the processes that she as a flood victim has been put through over the past year have, overall, been more traumatic than the floods themselves.

But she does want to thank those who came in to help shovel silt and save what they could, as well the Hawke’s Bay community for rallying around everyone.

At the time there was so much of it, it was almost too overwhelming, she said.

She squeezes her way through the door and shows off where the kitchen, bathroom, lounge, and the porch used to be, now just bare bones.

Ruth, or Malcolm, still visit it every day to keep an eye on it, to keep the dust from getting out of hand, to keep it tidy.

Just in case.

Chris Hyde is the editor of Hawke’s Bay Today. He has 10 years of experience in journalism, with a particular love for regional reporting.