With emergency services stretched, residents are banding together to clean up and guard against looters – and say they are seeing humanity’s best and worst
verywhere, strewn across the valleys and plains, there are apples. Red spheres line the roads and stud the drying mud. They are strung like beads on the fences, impaled on the barbed wire. As the flood waters rose, people waded through water up to the waists, then shoulders – and then swam through the torrent, past all the royal gala and braeburn.
Upstream, fuelled by 175.8mm of rain, landslides of mud and enormous hunks of forest debris, the Tūtaekurī river had swollen into a fury. Weaving its way towards the valley, hemmed in by the hills and narrower gorges, it had built to an enormous force, knocking out bridges and carving into the hillsides. Upstream, one road overlooking the riverbed has been sliced in half by the force of the water hitting as it rounded a corner – 10 metres above where the river’s surface now lies.
Across the road, however, a community meeting is taking place on the main street: after four homes were hit by looters last night, tensions are running high. As the meeting concludes, the town decides to construct roadblocks on the main route coming in and out of the town, using trucks and forklifted concrete blocks over the road.
In a ruined flat next to the local mechanic’s workshop, the water has stained Paul Shann’s walls brown-grey. He points out the high-water mark – a few centimetres above his six-foot frame. He escaped to higher ground before the waters got too high.
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