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State of emergency extended for week

Westport’s town-wide cleanup will take some time to complete, as army personnel help shift contaminated and soggy items from flooded homes. A Civil Defence Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) spokeswoman said efforts on Thursday revealed the process could take at least another two days, on top of the three days initially forecast. ‘‘Wet items will still be collected, it might just take a couple of days longer for them to reach everyone.’’ Yesterday morning Buller mayor Jamie Cleine signed a renewed state of emergency for another seven days. Another public meeting would likely be held on Monday evening and would be livestreamed on the Buller Emergency Management page. About 100 houses had been confirmed as redstickered by Thursday.

Last weekend’s devastating flooding in Westport has left 100 houses red-stickered, more than 350 yellow-stickered due to damage, and question marks over the future of the West Coast town. Senior writer Martin van Beynen and visual journalist Chris Skelton spent several days in Westport this week.

About 4pm on Saturday ‘‘all hell broke loose’’ in floodstricken Westport. All day water had been creeping higher, and low-lying houses in the south of the town were already flooded from the Buller River bursting its banks. Nothing too unusual, but a much worse calamity was on the way.

The town of about 5000 is essentially on an island, surrounded by the sea on one side, the Buller River on two sides and the Orowaiti River on the other. The Orowaiti takes the overflow from the Buller when it’s high.

Despite reports of its slow demise, Westport has been surprisingly buoyant. Building has been booming and property prices have gone up as early retirees sell up in the cities and move in to live without a mortgage and have cash in the bank. Investors have bought rentals and homeowners, unable to travel during Covid-19, are spending money locally. Remote workers also like the place.

This is not a derelict town. However, as the world adapts to climate change, Westport’s vulnerable location raises some troubling questions about its future. More of that later.

Normally the Orowaiti is not much more than a creek. But on Saturday the Buller was flowing nearly 13 metres above its usual level and the water was about to come roaring and dirty down the overflow.

About 4pm the Orowaiti burst its banks and inundated the northern part of the town around the Buller Hospital. Meanwhile, the flooding in the south of town, around the domain, was getting more severe.

Mandatory evacuations had been ordered the previous day, and now they were urgent. About 800 homes would need to be vacated, with close to 3000 people affected.

From 4pm ‘‘it was chaos’’, says one of Westport’s favourite son’s, Mickey Ryan, a Vietnam vet who runs a tourist business called Outwest Tours with two ex-army Mercedes trucks and another vehicle. He is the author of the ‘‘hell breaking loose’’ comment.

Not much sightseeing was going on as Ryan and Cheryl Hart drove the trucks down flooded streets, picking up people whose houses were inundated. Army drivers were doing the same but Ryan’s trucks have retractable steps, making it easier for the less mobile to climb on board.

When the water came up to his truck’s bonnet in Eastons Rd, which heads inland along the Orowaiti River bank, Ryan thought ‘‘hell’’.

‘‘It wasn’t so bad in the daylight but when it came to dark it was a whole different ballgame. You couldn’t see as well with some people driving crazy, with their high-beam lights on. Just chaos.’’

Cars had broken down in the middle of the flooded roads, and he couldn’t see past the line-ups.

Ryan, a former commercial fisherman, reckons he evacuated about 100 people but ‘‘it got that hectic you didn’t count them’’.

It all took a lot longer than expected. As he headed to a street to pick up residents, people were waving him down on the way.

‘‘A lot were upset and a lot weren’t. People brought their little dogs and their big dogs and the first thing they do is shake all over you.

‘‘...the water was getting deeper and deeper, and I was pulling out old people that have taught me a lot over the years at school and helped me out with a lot of stuff – you could see some of them were broken and that really upset me.

‘‘It got to the point where I was worried. I thought we are not going to get all these people out of here and if it comes over down by the Buller Bridge, no-one’s going to get out of Westport because we were on an island basically and half that island is underwater now. If it gets worse it’s going to be a real problem.

‘‘Luckily we had smaller tides.

If they had been king tides I would say we would have had a whole different story.

Response

Civil Defence controller Bob Dickson, who spoke on Wednesday only hours after being appointed Recovery Controller, says he is satisfied with the response effort. ‘‘The bottom line for this event is no loss of life,’’ says the born-andbred Westporter, who was formerly the area manager for the Department of Conservation.

He knew the town was in trouble when a couple of bumpy helicopter rides on Saturday over the town and up the Buller Gorge showed the gravity of the flooding.

‘‘The scale, breadth and depth of the water was just horrific. There was barely a blade of green grass to be seen.

‘‘I did think we could lose people. Older vulnerable people, living in their own home with support. With rapidly rising water, bewilderment. You only have to step outside, and they are bowled and gone.’’

The decisions to evacuate part of the town, first voluntarily and then compulsorily, were made at the right time, he says.

Dickson believes there was a good match between the flood planning and modelling done by Niwa and how the event unfolded. The control team was also getting an excellent feed of information from West Coast Regional Council engineers and scientists. Local civil defence veterans like Westport surveyor Chris Coll were invaluable, he says.

While the planning worked out, he accepted luck played its part as well.

‘‘We had no freeboard left. If it had kept going, the town would have gone under, and I don’t know what we would have done at that point. We couldn’t go north, we couldn’t go south. The roads were blocked, bridges were closed. In some ways a terrible disaster but we were lucky.’’

The O’Conor Rest Home in the south of the town caused the most anxiety, he says. The home has a secure dementia unit and some very elderly residents. ‘‘If water entered the building they would have to be evacuated and that would have been pretty damn difficult.’’

He believes the flow of information to the public during the flood could have been better. ‘‘There’s no such thing as too much information.’’

He answers criticism that civil defence stopped evacuation too early on Saturday by saying:

‘‘We made the call we didn’t want people working in the dark in heavy rain and flood waters, so we pulled back. We were confident we had all the people out we needed to get out.’’

He doesn’t agree it was chaos on Saturday.

‘‘We had a lot of people moving about with about 800 houses being evacuated. It was inevitable.’’

Dairy farmer Jamie Cleine, who has been Buller mayor for only 18 months, says the response was ‘‘appropriate’’.

The emergency effort was one step ahead throughout the calamity, he says. The emergency centre was set up before the rain started and the NZ Defence Force took the same approach, dispatching troops on Friday.

The first ‘‘pre-emptive’’ evacuation call was made long before the Buller River got anywhere near ‘‘really concerning levels’’, he says.

‘‘We attempted to get people to move in daylight hours and some did, but then some went home again so had to be re-evacuated in the dark. That’s human nature and I don’t blame people for that.’’

He expects ‘‘a really interesting debrief’’ and says the event has reinforced the value of having an emergency control centre in Westport, rather than running things from Greymouth.

‘‘We need the ability to stand up a civil defence command centre in Westport. We needed a direct link to Wellington, so we could bypass the regional command. I’m keen to maintain that.’’

It is important to have good local controllers who know the area, he says.

Stocktake

By Monday the Westport recovery was well under way, although some houses in the south of the town still had knee-high water around them.

Residents, their friends and family, and volunteers were returning to soggy, smelly homes to start cleaning up. Removing saturated carpets and sodden beds and furniture, so the houses could be cleaned and start drying, was the priority. Steadily growing mounds of flood rubbish started appearing in the affected streets.

By Tuesday the water had drained from even the worst-hit streets and house assessments were starting. The displaced have mostly been rehoused. Those who couldn’t bunk down with family or friends had found motor camp places and motel beds.

On a wet miserable Wednesday night the main players in the response held a public meeting in the NBS Theatre. Only about 60 residents attended, but the meeting gave a useful stocktake.

A mayoral relief fund, $300,000 strong thanks to the Government, had been set up and was taking applications.

A community hub was operating as a one-stop shop for residents needing access to agencies like the Ministry of Social Development, Ka¯ inga Ora and the council. Extra police had arrived and had started operating a 24-hour station. Fenz had brought in extra fire crews to help with the clean-up.

The council announced a threeday flood rubbish collection effort assisted by the army and contractor Westreef, starting the next day.

About 2410 homes had been assessed and about 100 been redstickered. These were homes that had been condemned and were uninhabitable. Residents were allowed to return to 368 yellowstickered homes where power could be restored.

Couple Marco van der Laan and Stephanie Wilson were at the meeting to hear the latest. Their home in the north of the town, which they bought a year ago as a do-up, had been red-stickered. They had just finished repiling the house and were on the next stage of returning the old bungalow to its former glory.

Earlier in the day, Van der Laan had been in tears. Wilson had tried to cheer him up with a bottle of beer, even though he drinks little.

A long-distance truck driver who works from Nelson, Van der Laan says seeing their project trashed and all their work down the drain was ‘‘gut-wrenching’’.

Their insurance company had told them the house was not worth repairing, and they would be paid the cost of repairs. He and Wilson want to stay in Westport and build on the section.

The recriminations

Only one person at the meeting wanted to ask a question in public. Josh Walsh, a Stockton mine machinery operator, had spent the day helping his mother, Jean, a Queen St resident whose house was flooded, sort through her ‘‘buggered’’ belongings, including photographs.

He was angry, accusatory and close to tears. ‘‘Why,’’ he wanted to know, ‘‘has this council and previous councils always pushed into the background the shingle build-up [in the Buller]?

‘‘The chickens have come home to roost,’’ the former local body candidate told the meeting. ‘‘What’s happened to this bloody flood committee, bloody marvellous what happened to the advice given by locals about the overflow and the gravel in the river. Never acted on. Have you got any answers for that?

‘‘We have talked about this for flippin’ years. What is the plan? Unbelievable, is all I can say.’’

Later he told Stuff the Buller was ‘‘chokka’’ with gravel and the overflow into the Orowaiti Lagoon was full of willows and undergrowth.

Gravel extraction was once a good industry in the river and could be again, and the overflow needed a good clear-out.

‘‘They don’t listen to the local people. They would rather have $100,000 consultants p...- a ..... around.’’

Ryan echoes some of Walsh’s points and believes the flooding was caused by ‘‘a whole raft of different things’’.

‘‘The Buller River needs dredging. We need flood walls, the overflow needs to be cleaned out. The problem here is the rating base. That’s the problem, is having the money to deal with the issue.’’

After the meeting, Cleine said flood protection measures in the Buller were the responsibility of the West Coast Regional Council, which had still not released its regional plan. ‘‘They have thrown me under the bus. The proposals for flood walls have been very vague, and it’s been frustrating trying to communicate with the regional council about this,’’ he says.

Last week’s flood was bigger than any planning for flood walls had anticipated, he says.

‘‘We had water in places that we never contemplated.’’

The future

Looking after the most vulnerable will be Dickson’s top priority as recovery controller, he says.

‘‘This is a relatively low socioeconomic decile district and there are a lot of vulnerable people in the town with significant welfare needs who will need support systems around psychological issues.’’

Cleine says the Mayoral Relief Fund will be critical in helping uninsured people get their lives back together.

‘‘There is a high level of unemployment and deprivation in the background, so it’s highly likely there will be low levels of personal insurance.’’

He doesn’t see a major exodus developing. ‘‘I’m pretty comfortable we will have a reasonable option to offer people in the not too distant future in terms of standing up this temporary village concept. The village will be one part of the solution and there will be some other options there for people in need.’’

The former harness racing trainer, whose horses have had national success, is still putting his money on Westport.

‘‘There could well be people who say that parts of town should be red-zoned or never built on again and that is a discussion for the future. My thoughts are the market will determine some of that.

‘‘What’s been interesting is we aren’t talking about a whole street of red-stickered houses. There might be six red but 12 that never got touched. It’s quite different to the Christchurch scenario where there was a whole suburb that was no good.’’

New building regulations and requiring buildings to be higher off the ground were definitely an option. During the flood, staff mapped the areas where the water got to and where it came from.

‘‘Maybe we need houses on piles that can be moved in the future. There’s a myriad options besides walking away from a town the size of Westport.

‘‘There are lots of options that are safe and a lot of great reasons why you’d want to still live here, but we need to provide options for people to retreat and over time, 50 years-plus, places like Westport will gradually migrate to higher ground. That’s where our planning and regulatory regime comes in.’’

He says Westport deserves the support of the New Zealand taxpayer because it might be Westport’s turn today but in a country with small coastal towns, it would be another town tomorrow.

Ryan is also in for the long haul. He says he saw a marvellous community responding to the floods. ‘‘We will survive. We’re Coasters. There is no other option, if you sold your house it’s not going to be worth much, so you’re not going to buy one in Christchurch or Auckland. We’ve got to tough it out and hopefully the Government will help with flood protection and all things will be rosy.’’

Dickson still sees a bright future for his birthplace. ‘‘There’s going to be some pretty high level discussions about no-go zones, more protection, shifts to another locality. But the town will still be, and we will endure it. It’s just a bugger we are on an island.

Trevor Warne, retired, was on Wednesday removing carpet and bits of particle board turned to soggy biscuit from his house in the north of the town. He had no power but had a stew simmering on his black Scandia wood stove with his slippers, drenched in the flood, drying on top.

He had spent a couple of nights in a relief centre and couldn’t wait to move back home. He was philosophical.

‘‘I can’t do much about it. I’ll get things cleaned up and carry on and hope the insurance company is kind to me.’’

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2021-07-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-07-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

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