Aerial pictures showing some of the impacts of the flood in Nelson. Photo / Tim Cuff
Aerial pictures showing some of the impacts of the flood in Nelson. Photo / Tim Cuff
Nelson freelance photographer Tim Cuff has seen the impact of flooding that has submerged the homes of so many in the region.
"I had a chance to go into one of the properties in [flood-affected] Nile St with the owner, who had gone back to check on his three cats,"Cuff tells the Front Page podcast.
"The flood had come through at a depth of around a metre and it was devastating. In his backyard, you could still see the water flowing, even though it had dropped."
The respite was short-lived. After further rain that evening and the following the water rushed through his home twice more.
"I don't even know how you recover from that," says Cuff.
Elsewhere, Cuff saw a house that had slid down a hill as the floods washed away the foundations.
"When you see houses disappear, it can't get much worse than that. We've been lucky in the sense there hasn't been any loss of life, but there'll be people recovering from this, probably, for years."
A property swept down the hillside in Stansell Avenue, Tahunanui. Photo / Tim Cuff
The cost of rebuilding after the flood is estimated to stretch into tens of millions of dollars.
Climate Change Minister James Shaw says it's still too early to quantify exactly how much the cost will be to repair the damage.
"If you look at comparable events in other parts of Aotearoa over the past couple of years, it could stretch to millions if not tens of millions of dollars," says Shaw.
"Some of the damage to roads and infrastructure could be at the very high end of that."
These floods have been described as a one-in-hundred-year event, but this isn't entirely true given that similar phrasing was used when flooding last hit the region in 2011.
It's a stark reminder that the impacts of climate change are being felt right now and will likely become more common in the coming years.
Climate Change Minister James Shaw. Photo / Dean Purcell
Shaw says that New Zealand will have to "walk and chew gum" at the same time as it repairs damage while taking steps to ensure that communities are protected from large-scale devastation in the future.
"You have to do the short- and long-term stuff at the same time," says Shaw.
"[For instance], if you've got a railway on a thin coastline at the bottom of a cliff, that railway is going to face repeated and increasing damage over the coming decades.
"Probably, the thing to do is to move it inland. However, that's a 10-year project and people still need access here and now. So you have to do a repair job on the asset you currently have, but you also have to start the process of how to make it more resilient in the future."
Combining this thinking will not come cheap, but Shaw says it makes financial sense when viewed in the context of the damage these events cause.
"People say this is going to cost us billions in the coming decades, but you have to remember we're already paying for it. The share of the economy going towards disaster recovery and civil defence has been growing since 2007. We've been paying more and more as a portion of our total GDP essentially for climate-related disasters for 15 years now."
An aerial view of the impact of heavy rains and flooding. Flooded paddocks in Glenduan. Photo / Tim Cuff
This thinking shouldn't only be limited to Government-funded infrastructure projects, with Shaw arguing that we also need to look into how our houses are built so that we don't end up vulnerable to similar devastation in the future.
"The very first thing I did as Climate Change Minister was to release Ministry of the Environment Guidance on planning for coastal erosion. That has been adopted, shall we say, unevenly around the country," says Shaw.
"And what we've said in the recent Adaptation Plan is that we're actually going to incorporate that into national direction and prevent new developments that will be increasingly exposed to those risks.
"At the very least, the immediate thing we can do is stop making dumb decisions about where we put our houses in the first place."
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The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am.
