Video: Getting help for isolated Wairoa was Mayor’s first priority after Cyclone
With no power or communications to his Wairoa farm on the morning after Cyclone Gabrielle struck, Mayor Craig Little knew he needed to get help to his isolated community.
A month on from the Cyclone, Wairoa Mayor Little told Hawke’s Bay App about sensing his community may be in trouble and realising he needed to get help from the outside world.
“My focus was getting people out of homes. My son is a mechanic and he’s got the licenses to drive these machines. So we got the big payloader and we started trying to open up to get me into Wairoa.”
“But we got about halfway, and the river was three metres over the road. So that was a waste of time. Then one of the other workers came down from the Tuai end, picked up the load and cleared up to Lake Whakamarino or Tuai.
“I was able to get up there, get on the radio at about six o'clock. And that's how I found out. I was able to get about five minutes coverage from a cell phone tower at about eight or nine o'clock in the morning.”
Little says he thought about who he could contact and decided to phone Local Government NZ Chief Executive Susan Freeman-Greene as “it’ll probably be dry in Wellington”.
His message was simple: “Can you contact the Prime Minister? Contact the Emergency Minister Kieran McNulty, and say we're completely buggered up here. We've got no communications, we need help."
“And then I got hold of Whakatāne and said: ‘Can you start cleaning the road from your end? Because that might be our only lifeline, State Highway 38."
Little says another stroke of good fortune was that a council staff member was moving into a new home without communications, so had acquired a Starlink.
“No one had heard what a Starlink was before that. We kicked that into gear and, well, voila, we had communications. But everything relies on communications. Your drinking water, your wastewater. We just didn't know what we had out there. Our drinking water intake was the pumps, electric pumps were 30 metres underwater, and those pumps are 1.4 tonnes each."
“It took four days to pump. Never ever, this flood came over the hundred-year flood zone, three metres above that. Came through the top of the doors and flooded the whole area. So our emergency generator was knocked out, everything. We've never experienced it like this. It was just mayhem everywhere we went.”
By the next day – the Wednesday, Little was able to travel via four-wheel drive to town as the river levels had decreased.
He was not prepared for what he saw on the drive in, describing it as “surreal”.
“It was just heartbreak. But the whole of North Clyde, it was gone. Businesses, everything. Couple of beautiful Maraes had gone under, Takitimu especially, it's the paramount Marae of Kahungunu, underwater. It's just like a loss to our community. So the kura, all the young kids and the teachers got in there and cleaned it out straight away. They were just outstanding. But it's just a horrible thing to see.”
Little also pays tribute to the work and sacrifices of his councillors and staff in the immediate aftermath of the Cyclone.
“The deputy mayor here, she was fantastic. When she knew that... Well, they couldn't get hold of me until that, she came straight in. Her house was underwater. She's lost so many much stuff in her house. But she just did what she had to do and came in and helped them out here.”
“And the council, we've got a few staff members, so people have just stood up. My PA, her house was flooded, she just came in because she knew that people needed her more than her house needed her. So just some wonderful things have happened.”
Despite the devastation, Little is confident the community will recover as they have come together in an hour of need.
