Extreme Weather
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So many stories .. this is one of many.
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@Stargazer yea that was a hard read.
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It smashed the family farm, lots of slips and broken fences, but fortunately no livestock killed or buildings flooded. The Omahu settlement got flooded as the Ngararoro river broke its banks. This submerged the substation, so Mum and Dad will be without power for potentially weeks. They have a generator fortunately.
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@DMack said in Extreme Weather:
@Stargazer I was wondering if that guy made it out. Bugger that.
It’s a hell of a road at the best of times.
My Uncle, Aunty and cousins are still on the family farm up in Putorino north of there. Cut off both ways. A neighbour has starlink (I might buy some shares) and managed to say they were okay. They may just have to kill a few sheep and go on the Rogan diet for a couple of weeks.
They said it’s way worse than Bola. My mates family in Te Pohue (anecdotally and maybe recency bias) say it’s about 10 x as bad on the land but they also measured 700 mLs in 30 hours so I believe them.In better news, my mate and family are safe from the Esk flooding. They got rescued when the water was half way up the house.
I managed to talk with a lot of people today and they are all in fairly good spirits, so far. Lots of talk about forestry, slash and accountability though.
appears that bola had more rain highest recording was over 900ml makes you wonder what effect slash had on the flooding
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@dogmeat said in Extreme Weather:
@Crucial Now add Omahu Waiohiki Jervoistown and Meeanee
Flood protection on Tutaekuri has failed.
We are due to drive down early Thursday - if roads are open
Gabrielle better not interfere with my (two) Gin Distillery events
I am in Meeanee and have a sister in Jerviostown. We both escaped serious flooding but there were houses within 100 metres that had to be evacuated so could count ourselves lucky in that respect.
Where I stay in Meeanee is probably only about a kilometre away as the crow flies from the Brookfields Bridge which sadly is no more. Some of the houses belonging to/associated with other long established Meeanee familes (close to 100 years or more in some cases) were not so lucky, especially those close to the Tutaekuri river at Brookfields where a number of those homes were flooded to roof level if the reports are true. One of those probably only 700metres less than from here. How the water never reached the part of Meeanee where I am is astonishing???? I often take a dog that has taken up residence at my place walking past there and it is scarcely believable how they got caught in the first place and we missed out given the complete flatness of the area. The most fortuitous thing is that that old Tutaekuri River bed flowed past less than 50 metres away from this house until it was rechannelled out to Awatoto. My great-grandfather had this property in those days and my older siblings can recall him telling them of flooding stories when they were very young (way before my time!)We have had no power, local phones, internet and mobile service until the mobile service came on again late last night. Ironic how I can receive calls from outside of the HB on the old copper wire landline but cannot make outbound calls of any kind (local or toll), so much for old technology!
Being in a "rural" area I suspect that we could be one of the last to get reconnected to the electrical grid so it looks like at least another few days or maybe even weeks) of cooking on an old portable gas camping cooker and washing clothing by hand (and believe me with a mother closer to 100 than she is to 90 there are lots needing attention every day!) Still it is what it is and we are way better off than many others are.
Being in a rural area we do not have the fancy extra fast top of the line rapid internet service and need power to spark the modem/router into action to keep up with our regular haunts. That was not possible until a couple of hours ago when a nephew arrived down from Auckland (via Ashurst thanks to road closures!) with a portable generator so we are up and running to a very limited degree. No generator going = no internet.
Fortunately the internet service seems to be working and as long as the generator is going we should be ok in that regard. On the downside we will be using it only spasmodically once the freezer is fully back to frozen temperature to simply maintain what we have in there due to its noise and petrol fumes it emits.There was a surprising amount of stuff salvagable that was down low and in solid frozen pieces, roasts and other red meats mainly. On the other hand the softish whitemeats were up in the baskets so out had to go all the chicken and fish/seafood, of which there was quite a lot. All the berries, ice cream, vegetables, bread etc were all defrosted and needed biffing onto the compost heap but at least the bread is still edible! The jury is still out on the frozen fruitjuices made from our oranges and tangeloes. Luckily the frozen peaches from our tree still seem ok which is just as well as the tree did a sulk this year and did not fruit.
Oh one thing having to have a dump in the middle of the night without any lighting does come with a few extra problems!!!!!
I have rediscovered the pleasure and time filling practice of doing 1500 piece jigsaw puzzles (until it gets too dark about 8.00pm) and then reading by candlelight! Not quite so enjoyable however is the warm beers that I have been consuming, they are not as yuck as people claim them to be, despite the rather different flavour to them in their chilled states.
Hopefully this gives a little insight into how things are progressing for the not so badly affected people after what must have been a truly horrific period for those in the Eskdale, Waiohiki and Omahu areas plus a lot of the real remote rural areas up country like Sherenden, Puketitri, Patoka, Tutira etc, not to mention the Wairoa district and the East Coast areas.
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@Higgins glad to hear you are ok bro, the devastation down there is just too hard to comprehend, how do you even start to rebuild, lives, businesses, new towns...gonna be, or bloody well should be, alot of change to how things are done going forward.
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@taniwharugby A little hard to reply as down here with no electricity (a good portion of the Napier City residential and business area got power back late this morning - we are not in neither of those two jurisdictions!) and until earlier this afternoon, internet, I have not seen with my own eyes what has been going on in the worst affected areas. I know that police cars have been very active ensuring roads are blocked off wherever necessary as well as roaming the streets, presumably looking out for changes in water movements or checking on people others may have concerns about. Helicopters still continue to pass overhead so they are still very active doing what they do.
This is an area that had to recover from a similar situation some 90 odd years ago so the hardships we are going through now are not all that dissimilar to what my mother faced way back in 1931. We did it once, we can do it again. Sadly there are not many people that lived through that period, or at least are old enough to remember the after affects (my mother was too young then to have lasting memories of those days ninety years later). The major difference is that back then people were capable of coping/living without the modcons and easily prepared foods that are around these days that are considered essential to life eg washing clothes by hand was 100% commonplace back then all the time and is something most people these days would have very little experience with (especially with the disposable nappies meaning no need to hand wash they shitty ones).
Many livelihoods will be affected financially, especially in the horticultural/ viticulture/pastoral and cropping areas with lots of plantings destroyed by a combination of wind and water (many years needed to get them fruiting again). Couple that with ruined vegetable crops prices are going to be high in the markets so gone will be the days of five cobs of sweetcorn for $1.00 that we used to get. Pipfruit will not be remotely close to $1.50/kg and we shudder to think what spuds will cost.
Whilst not having seen coverage of damages in the backblocks there will probably be untold fences needing replacing as well as hillside faces slipping away, both of which will have big impacts, cost for fence replacements and loss of productive land for the slips. It does not help with the interest rates near 20 year highs making things difficult to people needing to borrow to rectify damage or to hold producers afloat until they next crops comes in to give them any cashflow.
The RSE workers may see job description changes from picking fruit to other things like replanting tree seedlings, that is if there are any still in the nurseries available.
A number of the RSE workers from the Islands had very harrowing narrow escapes from drownings and lost all of their meagre possessions they came with. It is truly heartbreaking when thinking about things like that. On the brighter note everyone is clubbing together sharing food from their freezers etc to avoid it spoiling and bedding and clothing donations are pouring in. Sorting them and getting them to those that desperately need them is another task facing the powers that be. I suppose you could almost use the phrase "NZ getting back to the way it used to be when you knew all your neighbours and things were shared around". Sadly there are also reported cases of looting putting dampners on things. Why do scumbags need to do things like that in situations like this, it beggars belief? -
@Higgins said in Extreme Weather:
Sadly there are also reported cases of looting putting dampners on things. Why do scumbags need to do things like that in situations like this, it beggars belief?
Yes well, let's hope some karma comes and tears them a new one...in fact, there is an awful lot of clean up needing doing down there, lets put some real 'community' into community service!!
In tragedy there will always those that try to benefit from the vulnerable
one fucktard up here, after our area got power back on last week, went drink driving and aquaplaned into a power pole, taking power out for another 30 hours...he gapped it, tried to take the plates off his near new ute and hide in a local community centre...i drove past the next day when power was still out, his ute had certainly had some additional 'work' done to it aside from the power pole impact...
Yes, people back then were built differently.
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Bloody hell, just reading thru this thread and astonished by the damage and, more importantly, the effect on people's lives.
Just hope everyone can get thru this OK.
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@Victor-Meldrew said in Extreme Weather:
Bloody hell, just reading thru this thread and astonished by the damage and, more importantly, the effect on people's lives.
Just hope everyone can get thru this OK.
it's going to ruin some peoples lives for sure..
worst case scenario is your house gets red stickered, but the house isn't damaged. So no insurance as no damage to the house (you'll see a lot of that in Auckland cliff top properties) and you'll get a payout from EQC that's capped at I think $300k. But you may also only get a proportion of that if say you've got a large chunk of land they may say it only affects a 3rd they'll give you a $100k.
so defo scenarios exist where you're going to walk away from a multi million dollar house with basically nothing, but still owe the bank.
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@WillieTheWaiter wow, that doesn't even seem possible, how can the system potentially destroy people like that?
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@WillieTheWaiter I'm not sure that is entirely correct.
Same thing happened in Christchurch, but the problem then arises from a house being worth 1mill on the market, which is what people borrowed against, but only 500k to 'rebuild', which is what your insurance policy is for, and NZer are notorious for under insurance.
So in this case EQC pays 300k (or 150k if your policy hasn't renewed since 01/10/2022) and then your insurer pays 200k.
Either way, plenty that have extended themselves in the past couple of years with inflated prices and low interest rates will struggle, especially with house prices still high and construction prices high too.
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@taniwharugby said in Extreme Weather:
@WillieTheWaiter I'm not sure that is entirely correct.
Same thing happened in Christchurch, but the problem then arises from a house being worth 1mill on the market, which is what people borrowed against, but only 500k to 'rebuild', which is what your insurance policy is for, and NZer are notorious for under insurance.
So in this case EQC pays 300k (or 150k if your policy hasn't renewed since 01/10/2022) and then your insurer pays 200k.
Either way, plenty that have extended themselves in the past couple of years with inflated prices and low interest rates will struggle, especially with house prices still high and construction prices high too.
just going on what the senior property assessor on my project told me..
anyway will all come out in the wash!
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@Stargazer better to be safe than sorry, but being displaced again is the last thing folks need aye.
My sister works for Napier council and most of her team have been moved to help other agencies at support sites. She said some of her colleagues who have been doing that mahi over the last week or so are already burning out as everyone is so stressed and genuine need is everywhere. Not to mention so many people helping out are also thinking of their own whanau and have quite likely had damage to their own homes.
Some amazing stories of people being legends to each other alongside the tragedies. Just hoping the bad weather fucks off to let things dry out and give folks some respite.
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Areas of Mangawhai and Auckland north flooding again, then the HB and Gisborne regions, this is mental, dunno how some people will cope with this.
