When the offshore fault that is one day expected to generate a massive tsunami off the coast of Napier ruptures, 77-year-old Valerie Norton won’t panic.
She’ll pick up the easy-grab supplies she has stored by the garage door of her beach-adjacent Westshore home, then she’ll mount her electric trike and head for Onehunga Hill with as much confidence as she can muster.
She’s done it before. She knows the route and its little kinks and quirks.
Norton’s thinking is simple.
Experts estimate there’s a one-in-four chance of an 8.0 earthquake event on the Hikurangi Fault in the next 50 years.
That would, in all likelihood, send a devastating tsunami towards the North Island’s east coast, putting coastal Napier, and by consequence Westshore and by even more consequence, The Esplanade (where Norton lives), in an “inundation zone”.
That’s a fancy bureaucratic way of saying she’s in a place where the astonishing power of a tsunami could easily kill her if she stayed.
It’s the sort of reckoning that Norton knows will make her “absolutely charged-up” when and if the ground shakes angrily around her.
She doesn’t want that to cloud her decision-making before she turns her pedals.
Her key, she says, is planning.
“The thing that people don’t understand enough is that we’re going to be dealing with chaos,” Norton says.
“The nature of a major emergency like this is that it’s chaos – if you haven’t got chaos then you haven’t got a crisis.
“I don’t want to get sidetracked by the panic.”
New Zealand’s national Tsunami Hīkoi Week runs from March 9-15.
Today is also the 15th anniversary of the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami, which claimed more than 15,500 lives in the Tōhoku region.
The livestreamed images and video of it caused horror around the world and remain etched in the memory of many.
Norton’s done her hīkoi already and is sitting down with Hawke’s Bay Today to do this article to encourage others to follow her lead.
A former nurse, she bought her e-trike to help her keep her fitness and sanity as she recovered after a wave at the beach broke her leg eight years ago.
That trike has now become a big part of her plan to escape big waves.
Norton rides it regularly – using its 30km of battery charge – around the estuary.
She’s got her trip to Onehunga Hill, inland of Bay View after and about 4km north of her house on a shared coastal path, down-pat.
All told, she can get from her garage to her safe spot without straining too hard in 22 minutes.
Whether she has enough time to do it on the day disaster strikes, she will never be 100% sure.
But Norton loves her piece of paradise in Westshore, and has made a home and community in the suburb.
She’s not moving out any time soon, hence the need for a plan.
She’s far enough away from Ahuriri that she knows she doesn’t want to risk trying to get up Napier Hill, and putting her faith in a bridge across the harbour or estuary being usable and unblocked.
And if Norton can see a wave coming in that will arrive too soon to get to her spot, well, she’ll cross that path when it happens.
If there’s one thing she’s keen to promote with this article, it’s that the kind of conversations she’s had in her own head should be done out loud across the country, and ideally with entire families listening in.
Better to have a plan and then make a new one because the road ahead is cracked, than have no plan to begin with, is her feeling.
“It doesn’t have to be a big heavy kind of conversation, really,” Norton says.
“I worked in the ‘end of life’ area of nursing for a long time and it’s a little bit like talking about dying.
“We need to be talking about dying when it’s not absolutely in our face, so that then people can say what people want without it being guesswork.
“It can be fun – the underneath bit is serious, but on the surface you can have a laugh about it, really.
“When a tsunami strikes, it is going to be chaos, and we need to not step back from the chaos.
“Because doing this means there’s a little bit of calm in you, in amongst all the chaos.”
Hawke’s Bay Emergency Management director Shane Briggs said Norton was a great example for Hawke’s Bay communities.
“There are some real geographical challenges for residents in areas like Westshore in the event of a tsunami.
“What Val shows is that the most important things are having a household emergency plan, knowing and practising your evacuation route, and recognising the natural warning signs: If it’s long or strong, get gone.
“Every step counts. Being prepared and acting quickly is how we will get through a tsunami event safely.”
How to practise your tsunami hīkoi
Chris Hyde is the editor of Hawke’s Bay Today, which won Regional Newspaper of the Year in 2024 and 2025 for its coverage of Cyclone Gabrielle and its aftermath. He has more than a decade of experience as a reporter in regional New Zealand newsrooms.