Storm clouds have silver linings

A week after returning to his family's farm, DAVID PASSEY is moved by the support from both friends and strangers


News of approaching Cyclone Ivy is being broadcast on National Radio as we sit for lunch following the flooding that has wrought devastation on our family dairy farm in the Manawatu.

My 70-year-old father, Barrie, grimaces and declares that even a partial repeat of the recent flooding would be disastrous as he tries to salvage a farm still highly vulnerable.

Less than two weeks after the Pohangina River exploded over the 120ha farm that has been with us for 100 years, the property remains exposed and the cleanup has just begun.

Since I arrived back to the Pohangina Valley last week after three years in Stockholm, the mood has been one of stoic calm, but further trauma would be difficult to sustain.

Hectares of land are gone, hundreds of uprooted trees have been swept on to the property and metre-deep gravel and silt have turned the farm into a beach.

The cost of lost production and the cleanup could range into six figures. The job ahead is immense. The initial question has been, where do we begin?

But things are beginning to improve.

Bulldozers and earthmovers were moved in this week to secure a temporary river stopbank and begin clearing the mass of debris that scars our once highly productive farmland.

A team of workers sent in by the dairy company Fonterra have been stripping and cleaning up fences ripped from the ground.

Friends and relatives have cleared debris and raised temporary fences to bring back to production the remaining good land.

Contractors have walked the farm with my father, evaluating how and when grass seed can be sown and trying to devise cost-effective approaches to the retrieval of the farm.

"I would hope we are able to make substantial gains within 12 months but the effects will be with us longer than that."

Months of relentless work lie ahead, but it will be of little value if the river that threatens the top of the farm is not secured.

My father's immediate concern is that the chronic underfunding of regional councils will jeopardise the huge amount of river work that must be done and the farm's future.

"There isn't enough money to go around and that leaves a question mark hanging over us."

And it is the very unpredictability of the equation that grates on already frayed nerves.

What is the weather going to do? Can we sustain the cost? Are contractors available? What stock numbers can we carry? Can we buy feed? When will the milk tanker get through?

And yet, through this disaster, the concern of others not so badly hit has been inspiring.

Concerned neighbours walk boxes of food across the creek that blew out the road and left us isolated ... Unknown callers deliver newspapers and hope.

Gestures like these and the volunteers who appear from nowhere and work from dawn till dusk on the cleanup, plus the unexpected phonecalls, are deeply sustaining, my father says.

There are silver linings to the storm clouds that wrought this havoc.

But as the floodwaters recede and the cleanup hits top gear, further storm clouds are not welcome here.