Red alerts are in place for Sanma, Malampa, and Penama, with damaging gale force winds expected to affect those provinces within the next 12 hours.
Yellow alerts are in place for Torba and Shefa.
Meanwhile, a magnitude 6.5 earthquake has struck just offshore of Vanuatu.
The US Geological Survey reports the quake struck just after 5am local time, and was 10km deep.
No tsunami warning has been issued.
Action plan announced by PM Prime Minister Ishmael Kalsakau said that declaring a state of emergency would allow the islands most affected by Judy to receive help immediately.
“I am pleased to announce that the Council of Ministers has met this afternoon [Thursday] and it has approved a request from the National Disaster Committee to ask the President of the Republic of Vanuatu to declare a State of Emergency for the islands that have been highly affected and impacted by tropical cyclone Judy — effective this evening.
A road blocked by an uprooted tree after Cyclone Judy made landfall in Port Vila on March 1. Image: Oliver Blinks Instagram @blinnx/AFP/RNZ Pacific
“We have had two opportunities to meet with our partners and I am pleased to reveal everyone that has approached us are standing by to assist us in regard to conducting assessments and a quick response and whatever we require them to help us with.
“Therefore, on behalf of the people of Vanuatu and the government, I want to say to all these people thank you so much.
“To all our development partners who even as the tropical cyclone [Judy] started to approach us had already reached out and said they were standing by and ready to assist us.
“Our officials are working around the clock to try and assess the impact of the cyclone [Judy] on all the provinces in the country.
“At this stage they are still compiling an official report that we will be able to work with and which will enable our development partners to appreciate the level of assistance that we will require from them.
“As we speak aerial assessments are being undertaken along with other assessments on the ground to enable us to declare disaster zones in areas that are highly affected.”
Prime Minister Kalsakau said development partners have also offered help with assessments or quick responses to the most affected communities, or any help required by the Vanuatu government.
Aid group ‘gearing up’ to help The country director for World Vision Vanuatu, Kendra Derousseau, said her organisation stood ready to help in the recovery.
“We are gearing up for some key response areas that we know happen after severe cyclones,” he said.
“That is emergency shelter provisions, such as tarps and also hammers and nails, and also hygiene kits to ensure that basic needs are met, as well as jerry cans so families can have access to clean water.
“And we will be standing by ready to go with those when the government approves us to respond,” she said.
Derousseau said said that while the capital Port Vila lost power its water service was quickly restored.
She said most of the city’s infrastructure appeared to have stood up to the storm but not some residential housing.
“So anyone who was living in either a tradtional house with a thatched roof or a less sturdy house than those with cyclone strapping and nailing would have suffered significant damage to their houses.”
Derousseau said the big concern now was Cyclone Kevin expected to arrive midday today in Port Vila.
Meanwhile, 11 babies from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Vila Central Hospital have a new refuge following damage caused by Cyclone Judy.
The babies have been moved to the former outpatient section in tho colonial hospital after the ceiling in the maternity Ward was damaged, causing leaks, making the ward unsafe for the babies in incubators.
There were also leaks in the children’s wards forcing a similar evacuation.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Scenes of devastation on Epi Island. Image: Malon Taun/RNZ Pacific
Long-time residents in a street in Māngere, Auckland, say they never imagined that one day they would have to row their way out of their street to safety.
One resident, Mesalina, said they were left in the dark when the power failed and the situation hit home when she saw her neighbour sailing past on a boat.
“The lights went off around ten o’clock night time,” she said.
“I opened the window and said, ‘can you help?’ — I didn’t believe that the water had come inside.”
A month on since the Auckland anniversary weekend floods, Mesalina and her daughter Nancy are now staying at a motel, but Nancy said there is “no place like home”.
“She’s just really bugging me about really wanting to go back home,” Mesalina said.
“She’s kind of homesick; we just don’t like the motel because it’s something new.”
Te Ararata Creek overflowed
On that Friday night, the heavy rainfall caused Te Ararata Creek to overflow, seeping into the surrounding homes around Bede Place and submerging vehicles that lined the street.
Samoan community leader Paul Mark lives next door, but his house has been yellow stickered and flood-damaged items are strewn around the property.
Paul Mark’s yellow-stickered home which is put on properties with very restricted entry. Image: Susana Suisuiki/RNZ Pacific
Mark is staying with his sister in the nearby suburb of Manurewa but said the floods had uprooted his life.
“We’re trying to keep busy, like going back to work but we’ve got nowhere to go for home,” he said.
“We’re all scattered around, my parents are at a motel room and the kids have had to change schools.”
He said securing a new home was challenging as he had his parents’ needs to consider.
“We’re trying to find a place that’s accessible, that has a ramp and a walk-in shower for my mum who is a wheelchair user.”
Louisa Opetaia’s flood-damaged home in Māngere. Image: Susana Suisuiki/RNZ Pacific
House now a shell
Just minutes away is Caravelle Close, where Louisa Opetaia lived, but she said her house had become a shell.
Salvageable belongings are piled in the middle of each room but the bottom half of the walls have been taken out and the home is uninhabitable.
Louisa is staying at emergency accommodation in the city but said with meals not included, it’s becoming stressful.
“I don’t want to appear ungrateful but it’s just hard and there are families living in this hotel with us who have kids. They’re stuck in the city where there aren’t many places to eat except for fast food outlets and they can’t cook for their kids.”
While much of the country’s attention has turned to cyclone recovery efforts, the affected residents of Māngere say they’re still suffering.
“So there’s all these other kinds of struggles you know that are still continuing, even though it’s a month later — I mean the ground has dried up but the struggles that we’re going through still continue,” Louisa said.
Four weeks on from the flash flood that tore through their streets and turned their lives upside down, the residents of Bede Place and Caravelle Close are left wondering what the future holds for them.
Despite staying in warm and safe places for the time being, they know it’s not a long-term solution and that it won’t be a quick or easy mission rebuilding their lives.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Māngere resident Mesalina at her flood-ravaged home looking for salvageable items. Image: Susana Suisuiki/RNZ Pacific
Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest insurer says 20,000 homes across the country are at severe risk of flooding and it is in talks with government about where flood-damaged houses should be written off for good.
IAG is part of an advisory panel that is helping the government with managed retreat legislation.
Those in regions hard hit by Cyclone Gabrielle, who want to walk away from their flood-damaged homes, need answers, among them Peter Johnstone.
He stood on the roof of his house the night Pakowhai flooded, and felt creaking and groaning and feared the roof would collapse. Two weeks on, he was shocked to learn the insurer planned to fix his home.
“The people that are there to assess are sort of saying, ‘Oh no, this is rebuild, this is a refix’, refix is the word they’re using,” he said.
“I said, ‘You be kidding me, the whole bloody lot could be condemned, Pakowhai should be condemned’. Every house in Pakowhai is munted.”
He is 75 and together with his wife has lived on the four hectares for three decades.
‘Daunting for me’
“It’s just daunting for me — I’m not scared of hard work but it’s daunting for me. How on earth will I get that place back up?”
They want out and have commissioned an independent engineer to determine if the yellow-stickered home is, in fact, a write-off.
Also in Pakowhai, Keith Gore and his wife live between the two rivers and also want out. An assessor visited this week.
“The assessor is out of Christchurch and he’s been in the game for 43 years,” Gore said.
“He did the Christchurch earthquake, floods at Taeri, floods at Greymouth and one other, and when he walked in our house he said: ‘This is the worst I’ve ever seen’.”
He was not impressed that the insurer wanted to scope costs to rebuild the silt-ridden house.
A damaged property in Pakowhai. Image: Soumya Bhamidipati/RNZ
RNZ talked to three different councils in the East Coast — none would say which areas should be vacated for good.
Quick decisions needed Minister of Finance Grant Robertson said on Sunday decisions need to be made quickly on whether some places should be rebuilt the way they were — before money and resources were wasted in areas that would need to be abandoned.
IAG chief executive Amanda Whiting said the insurer had maps of areas at high risk of flooding, and was sharing these with officials.
“They vary and we’ve got to do a bit more mapping yet because we’ll have to agree on the parameters that deem those high flood risk zones. But we do have a lot of that mapping available and we’ll share that with government and other stakeholders,” she said.
IAG’s modelling shows 1 percent of homes — around 20,000 around the country — are at risk of severe flooding.
Until there was certainty over areas for managed retreat, Whiting said homeowners caught in limbo should let their insurer know if they want to relocate.
“Talk to us. As we start to get a bit of a sense of those people who are wanting to retreat that will help us with the government on a plan.”
Bryce Fergusson’s property in Waipawa during the Cyclone Gabrielle flooding. Image: Bryce Fergusson/RNZ
In central Hawke’s Bay, around 200 homes flooded in Waipawa on the night of the cyclone.
Bryce Fergusson was among locals who ran to safety when the river’s stopbank overflowed. Even so, he wanted to rebuild.
“I’m pretty sure it’ll be in hot demand living up on the hill now but we love our land. We’re really hoping this is a once in a lifetime experience.”
Bryce Fergusson and his wife are keen to stay where they are. Image: Bryce Fergusson/RNZ
Central Hawke’s Bay mayor Alex Walker said there was no urgency to relocate entire communities in Waipawa.
“There’s not a clear locality within central Hawke’s Bay district where we would be talking about urgent withdrawal of property but there might be some isolated pockets of one or two properties where there is a requirement for that conversation about where and how people may rebuild.”
Hastings mayor Sandra Hazlehurst said residents were already making decisions about whether to stay or go, and needed certainty — especially those in 680 yellow-stickered homes.
“We pretty quickly need to sit down with our affected communities, government, insurance council and banks and work out what this process will look like to give them some certainty about next steps and a timeframe.”
Up the coast, Gisborne District Council chief executive Nedine Thatcher Swann said it would likely to take time, and Māori landowners needed to be consulted.
“We’re talking about people who are deeply ingrained, who have whakapapa here.
“So it’s not a matter of simply, you know, redesigning and rebuilding and relocating. It’s a long journey that we need to work closely with our hapū and iwi on.”
For those in limbo like Peter Johnstone, it was a waiting game.
“I’m really worried about what’s around the corner, what do we accept. The government should be saying this is worse than an insurance problem, this is a major and we don’t want that little town to be there any longer.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A number of ni-Vanuatu Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) workers have also been impacted on by New Zealand’s Cyclone Gabrielle devastation, particularly those in the Hawke’s Bay region.
This has been a difficult time for people in Aotearoa New Zealand, but also for families of workers back in Vanuatu trying to understand what is happening.
Labour Commissioner Murielle Meltenoven and the New Zealand High Commission in Port Vila have assured everyone that all RSE workers in New Zealand are accounted for and safe — and that their welfare is a priority for the Vanuatu and New Zealand governments.
New Zealand government authorities, RSE employers, Vanuatu’s liaison officer, NGOs, churches and communities are working together to support affected workers.
The Pasifika Medical Association, a group of trained Pasifika health workers, is on the ground in Hawke’s Bay providing free health services to affected RSE workers.
Where worker accommodation was impacted, RSE workers have been supported in emergency response locations, often community halls or churches, together with other RSE workers.
All ni-Vanuatu RSE workers have now been able to return to their farms or to other suitable, approved, accommodation.
Employer obligations remain
Despite a small number of RSE workers not being able to work, obligations on RSE employers to support RSE workers remain.
This includes paying workers a minimum of 30 hours work a week at NZ$22.10 an hour and providing pastoral care.
The work of some RSE farms will be impacted on by the cyclone’s damage. Workers are able to work on their farms assisting with clean-up if needed, others will be doing their normal harvest work.
New Zealand officials are working to provide flexibility to enable RSE workers who were due to travel to affected areas or that need to be relocated to other parts of New Zealand.
Workers can also choose to return to Vanuatu if they decide they want to return early. It is important for workers to understand that they have a choice in any changes.
The Labour Commissioner explained that the Department of Labour (DoL) is working closely with the New Zealand government to monitor mobilisation of RSE workers into affected regions and assess whether workers need redeploying to other regions.
“I appeal to licensed agents sending workers to affected regions to work in partnership with the Labour Department and ensure mobilisations only go ahead when there is confirmation that approved employers can ensure enough work and safe accommodation for RSE workers,” Commissioner Meltenoven said.
Working closely with NZ
She sympathised with all RSE workers in this difficult time and has assured them that her office will work closely with the New Zealand government in ensuring that their welfare is prioritised and looked after.
Vanuatu’s country liaison officer, Olivia Johnson, is on the ground supporting RSE workers.
She is visiting them at their accommodation and working with Immigration New Zealand and the Labour Inspectorate to ensure safe conditions for workers.
“The devastation is extensive, and we had some workers evacuated out of their accommodation to safety. All are accounted for, and all are safe and well,” Johnson said.
“Our workers who needed to be housed in evacuation centers have been incredibly well cared for — while I was visiting one group at the Ascende Church in Hastings one evening a school out of Wellington had driven up to supply donations.
“The community support to all RSE workers has been humbling. My heart now goes out to the employers, some of whom have lost everything — this is also hard on our workers as most are like family and just want to stay, help and rebuild.”
Tragic, difficult time
Speaking about the devastation of the last few weeks with 11 deaths from the cyclone, New Zealand High Commissioner Nicola Simmonds said this had been a tragic, difficult and anxious time for many New Zealanders and RSE workers.
“From here in Vanuatu, it is humbling to see the contribution that RSE workers are making to support New Zealand at this time,” she said.
“Ni-Vanuatu know more than most about the devastating consequences of cyclones. But they also know how to respond, rebuild and support each other during such times.
“Many workers have been a huge practical help, but also a source of resilience and inspiration for New Zealanders. I humbly thank those ni-Vanuatu supporting New Zealand at this time.”
Workers who have concerns about their situation can reach out to the Department of Labour and Employment Services to raise their concerns and get an update on the welfare support that RSE workers are accessing in the affected region.
New Zealand police report that the number of people cited as uncontactable following Cyclone Gabrielle has dropped to eight — down from 13 on Friday night.
Some of those were people who, “for a variety of reasons, do not engage with authorities”, police said in a statement.
However, getting in touch with them remained a priority and all avenues were being explored to try and locate them.
Thousands had been reported as uncontactable after the cyclone caused widespread destruction across the North Island.
Monitoring crimes in storm-hit communities Police said that in the 24 hours to 7pm on Saturday, 534 prevention activities had been carried out in the Eastern District, including reassurance patrols and proactive engagements with storm-hit communities.
Twenty-four people had been arrested for a variety of offences, including burglary, car theft, serious assault, and disorder.
Fourteen of the arrests were in Hawke’s Bay, police said, and 10 were in Tai Rāwhiti.
An investigation into an incident in which a police patrol car was damaged in Wairoa around 10.30pm last night was ongoing.
Police said a headlight on the patrol car was damaged after they responded to a breach of the peace in Churchill Avenue.
Three people were arrested when they attempted to leave the address and a firearm was seized, police said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A tornado has torn through New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty settlement of Waihi Beach ripping roofs off houses and cutting power to nearly 1500 properties as post-Cyclone Gabrielle extreme weather continued to impact on the North Island.
Footage shows the storm tearing through the area about 9am on Saturday.
MetService said a severe thunderstorm watch for the Bay of Plenty had been lifted just before 10am on Saturday, but there was potential for further stormy weather.
Meanwhile, more than 200 people spent the night sheltering in camps in Mangawhai in Northland on Friday night as several slips blocked exit routes, with the latest weather event still blowing through the North Island.
Overnight, Mangawhai residents who could not return home stayed over at schools in the Kaipara District.
MetService said the Mangawhai area received 300mm of rain over a seven-hour period.
Kaipara Civil Defence Controller John Burt said roads would be reassessed at first day light.
The majority of routes might remain closed due to major slips, including the main road between Kaiwaka and Mangawhai, he said.
Hawke’s Bay under heavy rain warning MetService has put a heavy rain warning in place for Hawke’s Bay until 1pm on Saturday and a severe thunderstorm watch is in place until 5pm on Saturday.
Hawke’s Bay could expect a further 70-120mm of rain about the ranges, and also away from the ranges north of Hastings (which includes the Esk Valley area and the Wairoa District), MetService said.
Hawke’s Bay Emergency Management Controller Ian Macdonald said his biggest fear was if more rain than forecast fell.
Macdonald said localised downpours were a problem when silt was still around, but he believed the region was in a good position to cope.
“Plenty of resources at the moment, obviously we’re now fully activated and have been for a week and a half, we’ve got lots of NZ Defence Force here, so you know we’re in a good space if we do need to evacuate people.”
Police said the number of people who remained uncontactable in Hawke’s Bay and Tairāwhiti following Cyclone Gabrielle was 13 at 9pm on Friday — that is down from 56 people on Thursday evening.
The residents of Esk Valley were evacuated on Friday ahead of the heavy rain and Macdonald urged all Hawke’s Bay residents to be prepared to evacuate if they needed to.
Hawke’s Bay Civil Defence said a full assessment of Esk Valley would take place today.
It said the rainfall overnight was less than forecast, but MetService expects more rain across the region on Saturday.
Te Karaka residents advised to evacuate Tairāwhiti Civil Defence Emergency Management on Saturday morning strongly recommended that people evacuate if they were in the Te Karaka township area.
The Waipaoa River at Te Karaka was expected to peak at 8 metres at 9am on Saturday.
A truck removes belongings discarded on the roadside in Te Karaka this week. The small town of 500, about half an hour from Gisborne, was particularly hard hit by Cyclone Gabrielle. Image: Rebecca Grunwell/Gisborne Herald/RNZ News
In Gisborne, Mayor Rehette Stolz urged locals to seek help if they needed it this weekend, with the latest deluge likely causing more slips and flooding.
More atrocious weather had held back cyclone clean-up efforts and dampened people’s spirits, she said.
It may mean more people would need support from council and Civil Defence, Stolz said.
“We might have missed people and we want to know if you need anything, so if you need to make contact with the Gisborne District Council Civil Defence please reach out, we are there to help you.”
Tolaga Bay warning
Uawa Civil Defence in Tolaga Bay have urged people to stay off the roads as the Hikuwai river is currently at 11.5 metres.
The Hikuwai has begun to drop as rain has stopped in the area. State Highway 35 is closed from Okitu to Uawa due to flooding at Rototahi, SH2 at Ormond is also closed.
Meanwhile, staff from the National Emergency Management Agency and council are still working out how to make a risky debris dam safer, so locals can return home.
Sixty-four homes were evacuated in Tokomaru Bay on Thursday due to fears a debris dam on the Mangahauini River would fail during more heavy rain.
Stoltz said the dam had held up so far, and staff were working at pace to come up with a solution.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
New Zealand’s MetService has issued an orange warning meaning heavy rain is on the way for cyclone-hit Hawke’s Bay.
From now through until 10am on Saturday people in the region can expect 150 to 200mm of rain about the ranges and also away from the ranges north of Hastings (this includes the Esk Valley area and the Wairoa District), and 75mm to 100mm elsewhere.
The heaviest falls are likely from 3pm on Friday, with peak rates of 20 to 30mm/hr possible.
Other areas are under a heavy rain watch and thunderstorms are possible in Coromandel Peninsula and Bay of Plenty about and west of Te Puke from 2am on Friday until 1am Saturday.
Gisborne could expect periods of heavy rain, with thunderstorms possible in the 36 hours from 2pm today. Rainfall amounts may approach warning criteria, MetService said.
Auckland could also expect to be drenched tomorrow with some heavy rain and possible thunderstorms from midday until 10pm.
Meanwhile, as of Wednesday afternoon 346 people remained listed as uncontactable in flood-affected areas.
Police have deployed four specialist victim recovery dog teams to the Eastern District to help in the search.
The death toll remains at 11 — nine people in Hawke’s Bay, and two firefighters in Auckland.
About 700 people displaced by Cyclone Gabrielle across the North Island are still seeking shelter at Civil Defence centres.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
ANALYSIS:By David Norton, University of Canterbury
During Cyclones Hale and Gabrielle the poor management of exotic plantations in Aotearoa New Zealand — primarily pine — has again led to extensive damage in Tairāwhiti.
Critical public infrastructure destroyed; highly productive agricultural and horticultural land washed away or buried; houses, fences and sheds knocked over; people’s lives and dreams upended; people dead.
The impacts on natural ecosystems are still unknown, but there will have been extensive damage in terrestrial, freshwater and marine environments. Similar damage occurred during storms in June 2018 and July 2020.
While heavy rainfall and flooded rivers are a major factor, it is sediment and slash from plantation harvesting that has been the cause of most of the damage.
Slash is the woody material (including large logs) left after clear-fell harvesting of commercial forests.
Landslides in harvested sites pick up the material and carry it downstream, causing significant damage. All the evidence from Cyclone Gabrielle shows that much of the damage was caused by radiata pine slash.
The legacy of poor land management Sediment and slash from exotic tree harvesting sites were established as major factors in the damage that occurred during the June 2018 Tolaga Bay storm in recent court cases taken by Gisborne District Council.
Five plantation companies were found guilty and fined for breaching resource consent conditions relating to their management practices.
Multiple groups have called for an inquiry into the way plantation harvest sites are being managed in Tairāwhiti and elsewhere.
But given the severity and ongoing nature of these impacts, is it not time we move beyond focusing on management practices and address the broader underlying issues that have triggered this situation?
These ultimate causes are complex but primarily revolve around historic poor land management decision-making and human-induced climate change.
Among the key drivers of the current problems in Tairāwhiti are the large areas of exotic tree plantations that were established with government support after the devastation of Cyclone Bola.
But this devastation also reflects earlier poor land management decisions to clear native forest off steep, erodible hill country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which was also encouraged by the government of the day.
Looming climate change The other underlying driver of the disaster is human-induced climate change. Atmospheric CO2 levels are now 150 percent above pre-industrial levels and climates are changing rapidly with new and unprecedented events becoming the norm.
While increasing global temperatures are the most obvious feature of human-induced climate change, it is the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events that are having the biggest impacts on people and the environment.
It is essential that we hold the forestry sector accountable in Tairāwhiti and elsewhere. But we also need to urgently address the underlying causes because no matter how strict harvesting rules are, storm events are going to occur with increasing frequency and intensity.
Time for urgent action With more than 40 years experience researching forest ecology and sustainable land management in Aotearoa, I believe there are four key areas where we need to urgently act to address these issues.
As a country we need to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and rapidly increase the draw-down of CO2 out of the atmosphere. These are national issues and not confined to Tairāwhiti but as a nation we seem to be sleepwalking in our response to the climate emergency.
We need a comprehensive catchment-by-catchment assessment across all of Tairāwhiti (and likely other areas of Aotearoa) to identify those plantations that are located in the wrong place in terms of potential harvesting impacts. There should be no further harvesting in Tairāwhiti plantations until this exercise has been completed. We also need to identify those areas that currently lack plantations but should never be planted in exotic tree crops (for any purpose).
The government then needs to buy out the current owners of these plantations and embark on a programme of careful conversion to native forest. This will come at a cost, but it needs to be done. We already have models for this in Tairāwhiti where the Gisborne District Council has started converting pine forests in its water supply catchment to native forests.
Finally, we need to establish substantially more native forests throughout all Tairāwhiti, and Aotearoa more generally, to help build resilience in our landscapes.
The consequences of short-term thinking For too long we have been fixated in Aotearoa with maximising short-term returns from exotic tree crops without thinking about long-term consequences. The legacies of this fixation are now really starting to impact us as the climate emergency exposes the risks that poorly sited and managed exotic tree crops pose.
And we are now making the same mistakes with exotic carbon tree crops, again leaving unacceptable legacies for future generations to deal with because of a focus on short-term financial gains.
Exotic tree plantations have dominated forest policy in Aotearoa and we urgently need to shift this to a focus on diverse native forests.
Native forests provide significant benefits and could be the solution to the issue of soil erosion. Image: Amy Toensing/Getty Images/The Conversation
Our native rainforests provide so many benefits that exotic tree crops can never provide.
They are critical for the conservation of our native biodiversity, providing habitat for a myriad of plant, animal, fungal and microbial species. They also regulate local climates, enhance water quality and reduce erosion. This helps sustain healthy freshwater and marine environments.
Native replanting initiatives championed by charities like Pure Advantage need to be the primary focus of forest policy in Aotearoa now and in the future.
On February 7, a funeral was held in the northern Syrian town of Jinderis. It was one of numerous such funerals to be held on that day across Syria and Türkiye, following a devastating earthquake that killed and injured thousands.
Each one of these funerals represented two seemingly opposite notions: collective grief and collective hope. The Jinderis funeral was a stark representation of this dichotomy.
Earlier, rescue workers found a baby in the rubble of a destroyed home. Her umbilical cord was still connected to her mother. Quickly, they cut the cord and rushed the baby to the hospital. The entire family, save the newborn, perished.
Chants of ‘Allah Akbar’ — God is Great — echoed across Syria and Türkiye throughout the days of desperate search. Every time a person is found alive, or hanging to his life, the rescue workers, the medics, and the volunteers would chant the same words with voices gone hoarse. For them — in fact, for all of us — it is a constant reminder that there is something in this life that is bigger than all of us.
The heart-wrenching, sorrowful but also inspiring stories that emerged from the rubble of the 7.8-magnitude quake were as many as the dead and the wounded. Long after the dead are buried and the injured are healed, these stories will serve as a reminder of how vulnerable our human race is, but also how stubborn and inspiring it can be.
The little Turkish boy, Yigit Cakmark who emerged alive from underneath the rubble of his collapsed home in the city of Hatay was reunited with his mother atop the wreckage of their destroyed home. The image of them clinging onto one another after 52 hours of search cannot be described in words. Their unbreakable bond is the essence of life itself.
Another little Syrian girl actually smiled as she was being pulled out through the crushed concrete. Many rescued children smiled, happy to be alive or in gratitude to their rescuers, but this girl smiled because she saw her father, also alive.
Heroism is one of the most subjective terms in any language. For these little children, and for the thousands of rescued victims of the earthquake, true heroes are those who save their lives and the lives of their loved ones.
It is sad that, quite often, we ascribe heroism to war, and rarely for the right reasons. I have spent much of my life living, writing about or reporting on war, only to discover that there is little heroism in war, from the moment weapons are manufactured, shipped, deployed or used. The only heroism I found in war is when people collectively fight back to protect one another; when the bodies are pulled from the wreckage; when the wounded are rushed to hospitals; when blood is donated; when solidarity is offered to the families of the victims, and when people share their meager supplies to survive together.
This same heroism is on full display in Türkiye and Syria. The typical rescue site is a tapestry of human tenacity, love, family, friendship and more: The victims underneath the rubble, praying and pleading for rescue; the men and women above, fighting against time, the elements, and the lack of means.
Whenever a hand or a foot emerges from beneath the dust and debris, the rescue workers and medics rush to see if there is a pulse, however faint. Then, no gender matters; no religion; no sect; no language; no color; no status; no age, nothing but the shared desire to save a single life.
Such tragic events could take place in Türkiye, Syria, Italy, Algeria, Japan or anywhere else. The rescuers and the rescued can be of any race, religion or nationality. Yet, somehow, all our differences, real or imagined, all of our conflicting ideologies and political orientations do not – and should not – matter in the least during these harrowing moments.
Sadly, soon after the wounded are rescued, the dead are buried and the debris is removed, we tend to forget all of this, the same way we are slowly forgetting our rescuers and saviors during the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead of investing more in the structures, technologies and resources that save lives, we often do the exact opposite.
Though the pandemic continues to kill people in large numbers, many governments have simply decided to move on, to seemingly more urgent matters: war, geopolitical conflicts and, expectedly, more investments in new, deadlier weapons. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), world military expenditure passed $2 trillion for the first time in 2022. Just imagine if the increase in military spending alone was used to help, heal and rescue those fighting poverty, disease or natural disasters.
Our lack of a true sense of priorities is quite astonishing. While munitions are delivered to war-torn countries at incredible speed, it takes days, weeks and months for help to arrive to victims of hurricanes and earthquakes. Sometimes, help never arrives.
Chances are our confused priorities will not change, at least not fundamentally, following the Kahramanmaras earthquake. But it is important to reiterate this time-honored truth: heroes are those who save lives and offer their love and support to those in need, regardless of race, color, religion or politics.
A further 300 people listed as “uncontactable” in New Zealand in the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle have been found.
About 800 people in Hawke’s Bay and Tai Rāwhiti were still registered as unaccounted for, Hawke’s Bay Urban Search and Rescue team leader Ken Cooper told RNZ Morning Report.
Cooper said police and Fire and Emergency were working closely together and a lot of detective work was going on to establish whether people listed were missing or safe.
“Where there is a reported missing person and a location of interest, that’s where USAR can take all reasonable steps.
“The challenge we’ve got right now is that we have had people reported as unaccounted for but we haven’t got locations of interest, or we don’t know where they’ve been last reported.”
That left searchers struggling to pinpoint where they should be looking, he said.
“The important thing is, if you have reported someone missing or unaccounted for could you please get in touch with New Zealand police.
“We’d like to have more information so that we can narrow our search down and bring this to a swift conclusion.”
Update police
That included making sure to update police if a person reported missing was found.
USAR had 120 people on the ground, including Australian search teams.
The NZ Defence Force provided at least 40 people a day, there were extra police and Land Search and Rescue personnel.
He said UASR had not encountered this type of terrain before and conditions were extremely difficult for searching.
There were new challenges as the weather improved.
“As the silt and the effluent is drying and people are driving through it and the clear up is really progessing well the dust potentially contains some contaminants and pathogens that are a public health risk.
“That’s a risk to the public and obviously to our rescue workers in the field.”
Cooper said they had covered 2000 properties in a wide area search.
Rescue teams had carried out detailed searches of 600 properties where it was reported someone might be in the house, and had been through a further 620 properties in cases where someone was reported missing.
More than 400 workers from the Pacific evacuated to a Napier church during Cyclone Gabrielle should be able to return to more permanent accommodation in the next few days.
Workers from Samoa, Fiji, Tuvalu and Solomon Islands had stayed at the Samoan Assembly of God church in Napier after being displaced by floodwaters that swept through New Zealand’s North Island towns during the cyclone.
Many were part of the Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme.
One of them, Taylor Crichton from Samoa, arrived on Thursday after he and 46 others living at Taylor Corporation accommodation in Puketapu ran up a hill on Tuesday morning to escape rising floodwaters.
“At 5am we woke to water pouring in under our beds. We were like, just grab whatever we can and just run.”
Workers were rescued from a hill by a helicopter after they escaped from floods initially to a roof, in Hawke’s Bay. Image: RNZ Pacific
Forty-seven of them ran up the hill, where helicopters eventually flew them out five at a time. When the waters receded they were able to go back to their lodgings to get their belongings.
The group had been staying at the church since Thursday and Crichton said it was a relief to finally be able to call loved ones at home.
“We managed to contact our family back home and they were: ‘Where were you guys? And they all think that we lost our lives.”
Many of the workers had harrowing experiences, Samoan Assembly of God church volunteer Fuimaono Nathan Pulega said.
More than 400 workers from the Pacific were evacuated to the the Samoan Assembly of God church in Napier after being displaced by floodwaters that swept through North Island towns during Cyclone Gabrielle. Image: Anusha Bradley/RNZ
“A lot of them were stuck on roofs, rescued, and then others were stranded for two days and they haven’t eaten, or they were wet,” he said.
“Some were in a real bad bad frame of mind, so all we could do just as soon as they got off the army trucks or the vans was just hug and cry with them.”
Food and supplies had been donated by the workers’ employers, including T&G and Mr Apple, and some had come from further afield.
Some of the evacuated workers being served lunch at the Assembly of God church in Napier. Image: Anusha Bradley/RNZ
The Penina Trust in Auckland donated a car load of food and phones. Volunteer Catherine Ioane said supplies included comfort food such as corned beef, noodles and taro.
Most of the workers were to leave yesterday or today as their usual lodgings were cleaned up or more permanent accommodation was arranged.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins and Finance Minister Grant Robertson have announced a $50 million support package to provide immediate relief for businesses hit by Cyclone Gabrielle, as well as the extension of the national state of emergency, a new cyclone recovery taskforce and related ministerial role.
The full extent of the cyclone damage is becoming clearer as transport, power and telecommunications connections are re-established.
“Ministers will finalise the distribution of this funding in the coming week, but this will include support to businesses to meet immediate costs and further assist with clean-up,” Robertson said today.
“We will coordinate the allocation of this funding with local business groups, iwi and local government in the affected regions.
“The government recognises the weather events are having an impact on people and businesses meeting their tax obligations, so we are taking a range of tax relief measures as well.”
Tens of millions of dollars have already been put into cyclone recovery and support, including into Mayoral Relief Funds, Civil Defence payments, and a package for NGOs and community support groups, he said.
“I want to be very clear, this is an interim package and more support will follow as we get a better picture of the scale, cost and needs in the wake of this disaster,” Hipkins said.
Rolling maul approach
“I would note that in responding to previous major disasters a rolling maul approach has had to be taken and this situation is no different.”
Post-cabinet media briefing today. Video: RNZ News
Robertson said businesses would have different needs, the initial funding was aimed at providing cashflow they could access quickly. He said the possible need for a a long-term wage subsidy scheme would need to be assessed after this initial response.
An additional $250 million has been ringfenced to top up the National Land Transport Fund’s emergency budget to repair crucial road networks.
The $250 million is a pre-commitment against Budget 2023, the $50 million is as part of a between-budget contingency in funding the government already has.
Robertson said he expected it would ultimately cost in the billions of dollars.
‘Significant damage’
“In terms of transport, the damage to highways and local roads in these two recent weather events has been massive. About 400km of our state highways are being worked on urgently through Tai Rāwhiti, Hawke’s Bay and the central North Island to reopen safely,” Hipkins said.
An exemption from the CCCFA requirements has also been extended to Gisborne, Hawke’s Bay and Tararua — allowing banks and other lenders to quickly provide credit up to $10,000.
“While the full impacts of the cyclone continue to be assessed, it’s clear that the damage is significant and on a scale not seen in New Zealand for at least a generation,” Hipkins said.
“The required investment to reconnect our communities and future-proof our nation’s infrastructure is going to be significant and it will require hard decisions and an all-of-government approach,” he said.
“We won’t shy away from those hard decisions and are working on a suite of measures to support New Zealanders by building back better, building back safer, and building back smarter.”
The minister of immigration will progress his work to ensure skilled workers are able to come from overseas and work in affected regions, and ensure the wellbeing of and ongoing work for Recognised Seasonal Employees.
State of emergency extended Ministers also agreed to extend the national state of emergency for another seven days.
“The declaration continues to apply to seven regions: Northland, Auckland Tai Rāwhiti, Bay of Plenty, Waikato, Hawke’s Bay and Tararua … meaning that they’ll get all of the support on offer from a nationally supported recovery,” Hipkins said.
A lead minister will be appointed for each of the affected regions.
“I’ll finalise a list of lead ministers tonight and I’ll be tasking them with reporting back, working with their communities within a week on the local recovery approach that’s best going to meet the needs of their regions,” Hipkins said.
A new cyclone recovery taskforce headed by Sir Brian Roche and with regional groups, modelled partly on a Queensland taskforce established after their floods, will be set up. Terms of reference for the taskforce will be made public in coming days.
A new Cabinet committee will be established to take decisions relevant to the recovery, chaired by Grant Robertson, who will also take on the new role of Cyclone Recovery Minister, with Barbara Edmonds appointed as an associate minister.
15,000 customers without power Hipkins said there were 11 people dead and 6517 people unaccounted for, although 4260 were okay and police continued to work to urgently reconcile the others.
About 15,000 customers are still without power — the bulk in Napier and Hastings. Hipkins said about 70 percent of Napier had been reconnected.
“Work continues to prioritise reconnecting the rest.”
Council supplied drinking water in Hastings and Napier, and Northland is safe. Water supplies are safe in Wairoa, although there is a boil water notice. In Gisborne, the main treatment plant is operating, although there are still restrictions in place.
Where power supply to pumps remains a problem, bottled water or large water tanks are being supplied.
Fibre connections have been restored to all affected areas and is running at pre-cyclone capacity where the power is on.
Cell tower coverage is about 95 percent across the affected areas. Some are on a generator and able to support phone and text only.
“As power comes back on those towers will be able to be supported by fibre to provide data connections.”
NEMA has provided 60 Starlink units in Hawke’s Bay and Tai Rāwhiti, with 30 more in transit to Gisborne today.
The NZ Defence Force has more than 950 people involved in the response, with multiple activities.
The HMNZS Canterbury departs Lyttelton this evening and is expected to arrive in Napier on Tuesday, with supplies including bailey bridges, generators, gas bottles and emergency packs.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Almost 30,000 homes have no power and major supply chains have been disrupted in Aotearoa New Zealand — and Prime Minister Chris Hipkins is also warning that more fatalities from Cyclone Gabrielle remain possible.
Hipkins said it was now seven days after the cyclone had passed through and the true extent of the devastation and loss was becoming clearer with every passing day.
“Lives have been turned upside down, many people have seen their homes and all their possessions completely destroyed,” he told a media briefing in Wellington late yesterday.
Countless others have been displaced, tragically so far 11 people have lost their lives, and more fatalities remain possible.”
He said 28,000 homes remained without power.
“Telecommunications have been severely disrupted, fresh water is in short supply in some areas and roads have been badly damaged, limiting access to some areas and causing significant delays in others,” he said.
He said supply chains had been disrupted and moving goods around had been “incredibly challenging”.
“Crops have been badly damaged, many completely destroyed.”
Death toll 11
Earlier yesterday, police confirmed two further deaths relating to the cyclone, bringing the total to 11.
Hipkins today paid tribute to emergency services and first responders, who had done New Zealand proud.
Watch the media briefing
Video: RNZ News
“Many have worked themselves to utter exhaustion. The stress and strain of the last week is clearly starting to show, and particularly in places where power and communications remains disrupted, we know that tensions can be high.”
He said nobody should underestimate the psychological toll this disaster was taking on some New Zealanders.
“The past week has pushed many to their limit, even more so given it comes on top of other weather events, the disruption of a global pandemic and too many other significant and disruptive challenges to mention — our resilience is being tested like never before,” Hipkins said.
“But as we’ve repeatedly seen in recent times, adversity brings out the best in Kiwis. We rally together and we support each other.
“We look out for our neighbours, we go the extra mile to protect the vulnerable, we share and we care. ”
The Australian emergency responders announced on Friday they were supporting Fire & Emergency NZ with a 27-person impact assessment team and Hipkins said 25 of them were already on the ground in the Hawke’s Bay, with two supporting the national co-ordination centre.
He said Aotearoa had also accepted an offer of support from Fiji — 10 personnel from their defence force, four fire authority crew and four national disaster management officials were preparing to leave for New Zealand in the coming days.
Flooding in Napier after Cyclone Gabrielle, as seen from the air. Image: NZDF/RNZ News
Crucial satellite imagery
He added that the United States and Australia — through the New Zealand Defence Force — had provided crucial satellite imagery products of the affected areas.
“And we’re in the final stages of working to accept an offer from the Australian Defence Force who will support the New Zealand Defence Force with a C-130 transport aircraft, air load teams to rig freight on the aircraft and environmental health staff to assist in analysing health risks.
“All of this will be a great help and we thank Fiji and the United States as we thank Australia.”
Hipkins said making a monetary donation was the single most helpful thing people can do in the wake of the cyclone to support those disrupted communities, because “that enables the support organisations to [require] what is needed in those communities”.
He said there was no doubt that New Zealand had a steep mountain ahead of it.
Tough calls
“Our attention over the past week has been focused on the initial emergency response, rescuing those stranded, restoring lifelines and removing hazards. In some areas that still remains very much the focus, in other areas though, recovery is starting to get underway,” Hipkins said.
“As the shape of the damage and the need becomes clearer we’ll be able to shape our response accordingly.
“We know that this will come with a big price tag and we will have to once again reprioritise and refocus our efforts and our resources. We will build back better, but we will also need to build back more resilient than before.”
He said the country had underinvested in infrastructure for far too long and that had to change.
“If we’re going to build back better and if we’re going to build back quickly, some tough calls will need to be made, and I’m absolutely committed to doing that.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The number of people in Aotearoa New Zealand whose deaths have been officially linked to Cyclone Gabrielle has risen to 11, with confirmation of two further deaths today.
In a statement, police said a person who passed away in their Onekawa home on Thursday is “believed to have died in circumstances related to Cyclone Gabrielle”.
The news was soon followed by confirmation of another death in Crownthorpe, Hastings police reported last night.
Police said this person was also believed to have died in circumstances related to the storm.
Both deaths have been referred to the Coroner.
Meanwhile, Hawke’s Bay Civil Defence said the focus of its cyclone response efforts remains reaching isolated rural communities today, including Wairoa.
Hawke’s Bay Civil Defence said the focus of its cyclone response efforts remained reaching isolated rural communities today, including Wairoa.
Yesterday 12 civilian helicopter flights landed in cut-off communities with food, water, and generators, and to check on welfare.
Edaan Lennan said those efforts would continue daily, and some communities would need to be revisited and stocked up with supplies.
He said teams were also working to arrange temporary accommodation for those in evacuation centres whose homes had been destroyed.
Five arrested for looting
Police are stressing safety as their number one priority amid lootings in flood-stricken areas, and they also urged people affected by Cyclone Gabrielle to report if they are safe.
As of 2pm Saturday, there have been 5608 reports of uncontactable people registered and 1196 reports from people registering that they are safe.
With communications slowly returning to areas severely affected by the cyclone, police are asking for people who have been uncontactable to friends and family to report themselves as being safe online as soon as possible.
As of Saturday night, five people have been arrested after a spate of lootings across Hawke’s Bay.
More than 100 extra officers were brought into the Eastern District, including to areas that were cut off from Cyclone Gabrielle.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
“Keep listening to the radio. You guys have done a great job updating people and it’s very much appreciated,” the Civil Defence Minister Keiran McAnulty told Newstalk ZB’s last Sunday afternoon as Gabrielle was just beginning to wreak havoc.
Barely two weeks earlier, sudden and catastrophic flooding in and near Auckland caught the media off-guard, but some commentators claimed the heavy warnings about Gabrielle were oppressively ominous — and risked “crying wolf”.
Gabrielle ended up as a national emergency and sparked non-stop rolling news coverage. There were few flat spots on TV and radio, and live online reporting around the clock also give a comprehensive picture — and pictures — of what was going on.
It stretched newsrooms to their limits, but news reporters’ work was skillfully and selectively supplemented with a steady stream of vivid eyewitness accounts.
Forestry slash flood
Tolaga Bay farmer Bridget Parker’s description on RNZ Nine to Noon of yet another inundation at her place with added forestry slash was among the most confronting (and sweary).
Checkpoint’s emotional interview on Wednesday with a couple that owned a house in which a friend “disappeared under water” was compelling — but also chilling.
RNZ’s Kate Green arrived in Gisborne on Monday with the only means of communicating that worked — a satellite phone.
“You can’t even dial 111. Everything that can break is broken,” she told RNZ Morning Report listeners, quoting the local mayor.
RNZ’s Māni Dunlop, who managed to fly in on Tuesday, told listeners that from the air the East Coast looked “buggered”.
Gisborne is a city and Tairawhiti a region not well covered at the best of times by New Zealand’s national media, which have no bureaux there. It is a bit of an irony that in the worst of times, it was so hard to get the word out.
But the locally-owned Gisborne Herald stepped up, somehow printing editions every day distributed free to 22,000 homes — with the help of NZDF boots n the ground on some days.
Proud news day
“I’m proud to be working on this paper today,” reported Murray Robertson said, signing off an eye-opening video of scenes of the stricken city posted online once power came back and a fresh Starlink unit kicked in.
On Wednesday, ZB’s Mike Hosking pleaded on air for diesel to keep their signal up in Hawke’s Bay, while the editor of Hawke’s Bay Today Chris Hyde — only months into his job — found himself literally powerless to publish when the rivers rose, cutting the electricity and cutting him off from many of his staff.
“The first day I was in a black hole. In a big news event, the phones ring hot. This was the biggest news event in Hawke’s Bay since the Napier earthquake . . . and my phone wasn’t ringing at all,” he told Mediawatch.
“Wiped out” – the Hawke’s Bay Today’s first (free) edition after the cyclone news “back hole”. Image: Screenshot APR
Hyde, just 32 years old, was a student in Christchurch when The Press stunned citizens by publishing a paper the morning after the deadly 2011 quake.
Hyde said NZME chief editor Shayne Currie and The New Zealand Herald’s Murray Kirkness were instrumental in putting the Auckland HQs resources into getting NZME’s upper North Island dailies promptly back in print and available for free.
“Just keep supporting local news, because in moments like this, it really does matter,” Chris Hyde told Mediawatch.
On Wednesday, Hyde had the odd experience of seeing Tuesday’s edition of the paper on the AM show on TV before he had even seen it himself.
Cut-off news focus
On Wednesday, RNZ switched to focus on news for areas cut off or without power — or both — where people were depending on the radio. RNZ’s live online updates went “text-only” because those who could get online might only have the bandwidth for the basics.
Day of ‘danger’
This is the first copy of Tuesday’s @hawkesbaytoday that I’ve seen. It never made it to my home, to our offices, to our subscribers. When I wrote that headline had some idea of what was coming, and yet we had no idea. pic.twitter.com/57PmhoeyYr
Media analyst and former New Zealand Herald editor Dr Gavin Ellis . . . “Those two episodes where chalk and cheese. Coverage of Cyclone Gabrielle by all media was excellent.” Image: RNZ News
But Gavin Ellis said earlier this week he couldn’t get a clearer picture of Gabrielle’s impact without mainstream media.
“Those two episodes where chalk and cheese. Coverage of Cyclone Gabrielle by all media was excellent, both in warning people about what was to come – although that wasn’t universal – and then talking people through it and into the aftermath, And what an aftermath it’s been,” he told Mediawatch.
“This is precisely why we need news media. They draw together an overwhelming range of sources and condense information into a readily absorbed format. Then they keep updating and adding to the picture.” he wrote.
Retro but robust radio
“If you’re sitting on your rooftop surrounded by water, you can still have a radio on.” Image: Flickr/RNZ News
“It’s even more pressing if you haven’t got electricity, and you haven’t got those online links. That was when radio really came into its own,” said Ellis.
“Organisations like the BBC,and the ABC (Australia) are talking about a fully-digital future and moving away from linear broadcasting. What happens to radio in those circumstances if you haven’t got power? If you’re sitting on your rooftop surrounded by water, you can still have a radio on, he said.
“We need to have a conversation about the future of media in this country and the requirements in times of urgency need to be looked at,” Ellis told Mediawatch.
RNZ’s head of news Richard Sutherland’s had the same thoughts.
NZ head of news Richard Sutherland . . . “It has certainly been a reminder to generations who have not been brought up with transistor radios they are important to have in a disaster.”
“It has certainly been a reminder to generations who have not been brought up with transistor radios they are important to have in a disaster. This will also sharpen the minds of people on just how important ‘legacy’ platforms like AM transmission are in civil defence emergencies like the one we’ve had,” he said.
“With the Tonga volcano, Tonga was cut off from the internet. and the only thing getting through was shortwave radio. In the 2020s, we are talking about something that’s been around since the early 1900s still doing the mahi. In this country, we are going to need to think very carefully about how we provide the belt and braces of broadcasting infrastructure,” he told Mediawatch.
“Everyone was super-aware of the way that the Auckland flooding late last month played out — and no one wanted to repeat that,” said Sutherland, formerly a TV news executive at Newshub, TV3, TVNZ and Sky News.
“Initially the view was this is going to be bad news for Auckland because Auckland, already very badly damaged and waterlogged. But as it turned out, of course, it ended up being Northland, Coromandel, Hawke’s Bay have been those areas that caught the worst of it,” Sutherland told Mediawatch.
News contraction
“Over the years, and for a number of reasons, a lot of them financial, all news organisations have contracted. And you contract to your home city or a big metropolitan area, because that’s where the population is, and that’s where the bulk of your audience is,” he said.
“But this cyclone has reminded us all as a nation, that it’s really important to have reporters in the regions, to have strong infrastructure in the regions. I would argue that RNZ is a key piece of infrastructure,” he said.
“This incident has shown us that with the increasing impact of climate change, news organisations, particularly public service lifeline utility organisations like RNZ, are going to have to have a look at our geographic coverage, as well as our general coverage based on population,” he said
“We are already drawing up plans for have extra boots on the ground permanently . . but also we need to think where are the regions that we need to have more people in so that we can respond faster to these sorts of things,” he said.
“We are at a moment where we could do something a bit more formal around building a more robust media infrastructure . . . for the whole country. I would be very, very keen for the industry to get together to make sure that the whole country can benefit from the combined resources that we have.
“Again, everything comes down to money. But if the need is there, the money will be found,” he said.
Now that the government’s planned new public media entity is off the table, it will be interesting to see if those holding the public purse strings see the need for news in the same way.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Cyclone Gabrielle death toll rises to 11 after two deaths reported today https://t.co/ifMjC2wFsc
The victims of the devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake in Turkey and Syria need your help now. The surviving families and children and those rescued alive from the rubble are in serious danger in affected wintertime impoverished regions. Refugees in other places fleeing their war-torn homelands are also suffering. International aid agencies are grossly insufficient for these immediate humanitarian necessities.
What are you Big Business Titans doing sitting on massive pay, profits and tax escapes? Awakening your consciousness for your fellow human beings may be a modest form of redemption. Further, you have access to logistics specialists, delivery systems, communication facilities and many other contacts and resources. You get your calls returned! Fast!
Tim Cook, you have been making $833 a MINUTE (plus lavish benefits). Remarkably, your compensation is not even in the top ten of operating company CEOs. Moreover, your own cultivated sense of envy knows that there are Hedge Fund Goliaths, who in some recent years, made off with over $2,500 per MINUTE on a forty-hour week.
Tim, you and the Apple corporation are known to pay few taxes given what tax attorneys and tax accountants do for you (especially with Apple taking advantage of foreign tax havens while receiving the fruits of Washington’s free government R&D over the years). Your company has so much leftover money, flowing from the deprivation of a million serf laborers in China, and so few productive outlets for this mass of capital that you have set records for stock buybacks—over $400 billion in the last decade.
You and Apple and the Hedge Fund Titans are not known for your charitable giving as a percent of your adjusted gross income. Yet, if asked “Do you believe in the Golden Rule?” you would probably say “Yes” – at least in public.
Use your wealth and newfound empathy to organize direct relief for these earthquake victims and other major refugee areas such as the starving children of Somalia. Deliver food, medicine, clothing, shelter, mobile clinics and many other available airlifted essentials. Hire skilled people to make it happen. Give your new organization a prominent logo for permanence and for setting an example for other super-rich to emulate.
Your isolation from the public expectation that you enter the above engagements in a significant way is quite remarkable. That should trouble you and your public relations advisors.
Just this week National Public Radio (NPR) featured a startling compilation of what producers of movies and TV shows believe appeals to their viewers. It is no longer awe or envy of the ‘rich and famous.’ It is no longer the Horatio Alger myth. It is encapsulated in NPR’s headline: Why “eat the rich” storylines are taking over TV and movies.
As Bob Dylan sang, “the times, they are a-changin’.”
NPR reporter Kristin Schwab related:
Hollywood’s depictions of the wealthy – and perhaps societal attitudes toward them – have changed.… The moment isn’t random. Think about the extreme economic events we’ve been through. There’s the pandemic, when essential workers kept the country running while the richest 1% amassed a huge sum of wealth – twice as much as the rest of the world put together (her emphasis), according to the non-profit Oxfam. And before that was The Great Recession, which is how we got the term “the 1%.
Mr. Cook, Apple is reportedly making a contribution to the Turkey/Syria relief effort. Are you personally making a contribution? Your Big Business Titan comrades may think they can get away with gated, cold-blooded mentalities. They may be right about that if the mass media doesn’t turn its steely gaze toward their hoards of gold and question their “don’t give a damn” attitude.
Maybe they just can’t help themselves – so busy are they counting their lucre. Here is an idea: ask them to ask their grandchildren, 12 and under, what they want them to do. Absorb their moral authority and MOVE FAST TO HELP THOSE IN NEED!
The death toll from Cyclone Gabrielle in Aotearoa New Zealand is rising — now 9 — and many areas in Hawke’s Bay have been left as disaster zones with rescues, rather than recovery, still the focus.
Power, internet and phone service is still patchy for many people in the region making communication difficult.
Police are working to reconnect people with loved ones who have been reported missing.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins was in Esk Valley on Friday — an area where homes were completely inundated with water.
Driving through Eskdale, the mud is thick and still water crosses the roads in places.
Debris is strewn across orchards, fields and fences. Parts of the road are washed away, there are dead animals, and cars are wedged against buildings.
A lone boat perches on the dross in a field.
Harrowing time
It was a harrowing time for Maureen Dorr who owns The Doggy Farmstay in Eskdale.
When the floodwaters hit her house, she had six dogs staying with them and three of her own.
“So John got one — a German shepherd — and put him in the laundry. We put another one in the bathroom — a rottweiler, and then we put four on the double bed, and then I held two of them above the pantry near the ceiling.
“They (the floodwaters) came right up to our neck, and then John smashed the kitchen window as the water below the windowsill was lower and let some of the water out.”
She spent 12 hours like this, because going outside was even worse.
Some of the dogs nearly drowned, but they managed to revive them.
An 82-year-old man in a ute found them on the road and asked them if they needed help.
Escaped the valley
They bundled the small dogs in a box and tied the larger dogs on the back, escaping the valley, and leaving behind a derelict home.
“There’s no way you could even get in the house for silt. The kitchen side of the house is just about gone, the wall’s just about out. The furniture’s all backed up inside it, and we had drawers coming down the hallway, leaning against the kitchen window.”
All of the dogs survived, and the six dogs staying at her kennels are with other families until they can be returned to their owners.
Dorr is staying in Bay View and said they were being well supported and her neighbours were OK — they were up to their waist in water before getting into the roof cavity and being evacuated.
She is insured, but thinking about the future is too hard right now.
Nearby, Bay View residents are banding together to check on and support those impacted in the Esk Valley.
Bay View resident Rowan Kyle . . . “It’s just unrecognisable. There’s just cars upside down, stacked everywhere. It’s like a bomb has gone off.” Photo: Tess Brunton/RNZ News
Rowan Kyle was one of them.
‘An apocalypse basically’
“I’d call it an apocalypse basically … being local to the area, it’s just unrecognisable. There’s just cars upside down, stacked everywhere. It’s like a bomb has gone off.”
One of the new developments had been devastated, Kyle said.
“They’re filled to the brim with mud, silt. Yeah, they’ve just had it. They’re saying that there’s potential, they might just have to write them off completely.”
He did not understand why the NZ Defence Force had not been in to assist them, saying residents have been mostly left to organise, pick up the pieces, and “fudge their way through it”.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins visited the Hawke’s Bay region on Friday. Image: Tess Brunton/RNZ News
Prime Minister Hipkins was discouraging people from speculating over the death toll of Cyclone Gabrielle.
“It’s no good to anybody speculating about how many people have been injured or how many people may have died in this tragedy. We’ll certainly share that information as soon as we can.
‘Outlandish claims’
“But I’ve heard some outlandish claims out there at the moment that there is no evidence to support.”
The cyclone was the biggest natural disaster seen this century, he said.
Thirty-one thousand people in Napier, 6000 people in Hastings and 1000 people in Wairoa have been without power for four days.
Civil Defence in Hawke’s Bay said there are still thousands of people in hundreds of communities who have yet to be contacted.
Group Controller Ian Macdonald said there were too many uncontacted communities to list and they were prioritising those they suspected were worst affected by the flooding.
“There are literally tens and maybe hundreds of communities. Communities can be anything from a 1000 people in one community at the back of Rissington through to just tens of people or just a few people.”
Helicopters were delivering communication gear and emergency supplies to the worst affected communities, he said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Cyclone Gabrielle: Thousands uncontactable, hundreds still without water or power https://t.co/PBdQjQqtmq
The severe impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle on the North Island, and the five severe weather events experienced by the Thames–Coromandel region in just the first two months of 2023, are merely the latest examples of more frequent erosion-triggering rainfall events over the past decade.
Inevitably with the heavy rain, soil, rocks and woody material (also known as “slash”) from landslides have flowed down onto valleys and flood plains, damaging the environment and risking human safety.
Clear-fell harvesting of pine forests on steep erosion-prone land has been identified as a key source of this phenomenon.
So we need to ask why we harvest pine forests on such fragile land, and what needs to change to prevent erosion debris and slash being washed from harvested land.
Pine was a solution Ironically, most of these pine forests were planted as a solution to soil erosion that had resulted from the clearing of native forests to create hill country pastoral farms.
The clearing of native forests happened in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but the consequences — erosion, flooding and floodplains covered in silt and rocks — only became apparent decades later.
So the need to reforest large areas of erosion-prone farmland is scientifically well accepted.
Why pine? But why did we choose radiata pine for our reforestation efforts instead of other tree species?
Even today, it is hard to find affordable and feasible alternatives to radiata pine. Affordable is the key word here.
We are not a rich country and our liking for “Number 8 wire” solutions makes a virtue out of necessity — we don’t have the money to pay for anything fancier.
Radiata pine is a cheap and easy tree to establish and it grows fast and reliably. Planting native or other exotic trees, such as redwoods, is possible, but it costs more and needs more skill and care to grow a good crop.
‘Has to be done’: Forestry industry under fire as McAnulty calls for slash to be investigated https://t.co/7lx5G2t07W
The problem with radiata pine is that if grown as a commercial crop, it is clear-fell harvested after about 28 years.
The clear-felled land is just as erosion-prone as it was before trees were planted — with the added threat of large amounts of logging slash now mixed in with the erosion debris.
It can take six years or more after harvesting before the replanted pine trees cover the ground and once again provide protection to the soil.
Benefits of pine come with a cost If we take a long-term perspective, research shows that even a radiata pine forest that is clear-felled once every 28 years will still significantly reduce erosion, compared with a pastoral farm on erosion-prone hill country.
This is because the erosion from the clear-felled forest is outweighed by the reduced erosion once the replanted trees cover the land.
However, this is not much comfort to communities in the path of the flood-borne soil and logs from that clear-felled forest. It’s difficult to take a long-term perspective when your backyards and beaches are covered with tonnes of wood and soil.
Slash a byproduct of efficiency Whatever benefits radiata pine forests bring, we need to transition forest management away from “business as usual” clear-felling on erosion-prone hill country.
This transition is possible, but one important problem is not often discussed. The pine forests are privately owned by a range of people including iwi, partnerships made up of mum-and-dad investors and large international forestry companies.
All these people have created or acquired these forests as an investment.
A typical pine forest investment makes a good financial return, but this assumes normal efficient forestry, including clear-felling large areas with highly-productive mechanised logging gangs.
It has become clear that we need to manage forests differently from this large-scale “efficient” model to reduce the risk of erosion and slash from erosion-prone forests.
Changing how we manage these forests will inevitably reduce the economic return, and forest investors will absorb this reduction.
When a cyclone bears down on the East Coast, it’s not just wind and rain residents brace for. https://t.co/h9TJr3Q2dv
Time for a permanent fix If we go back to when the pine forests being harvested today were planted, the forests had a social value — not just in reducing erosion but in providing employment in rural areas where few jobs were available.
This social value was recognised by government funding, initially through tree planting by a government department, the NZ Forest Service. With the rise of free market economics in the 1980s, such direct government investment was considered inefficient and wasteful.
The Forest Service was disbanded in 1987 and its forests were sold to forestry companies. However, the government continued to promote tree planting on erosion-prone land with subsidies to private investors.
As these forests grew, they came to be considered purely as business investments and were bought and sold on that basis. When the time came to harvest the trees, the expectation was that these could be clear-fell harvested in the same conventional way as commercial forests growing on land with no erosion risk.
As erosion started occurring on the harvested sites, it became clear why these trees were originally planted as a social investment to protect the land and communities from soil erosion.
Aotearoa New Zealand has achieved control of erosion with a Number 8 wire solution- encouraging private investors to grow commercial pine forests on erosion-prone land. The problem with Number 8 wire solutions is that after a while the wire fails, and you have to find a permanent fix.
Conventional commercial pine forestry was a good temporary solution, but now we need to find a more sustainable way to grow forests on our most erosion-prone lands – and it won’t be as cheap.
New Zealanders should be prepared for the number of fatalities in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle to increase, says Prime Minister Chris Hipkins.
He said at a media briefing in Gisborne that every available resource was being used to help find those who are missing and to rescue those who were known about but unable to be reached.
Over the past two days the rescue coordination centre had overseen 450 rescues and all rescue requests in the 111 system had been completed, Hipkins said.
Overnight the death toll rose to seven but there are still people for whom the police hold grave concerns.
As of 2.30pm yesterday, 3544 reports of uncontactable people had been registered with the police. A further 450 had been reported as found.
Those included multiple reports for the same people. Police were prioritising those in the more isolated areas.
“And we do need to be prepared for the likelihood that there will be more fatalities,” Hipkins said.
The situation in Gisborne Hipkins said the damage in Gisborne was extensive and there was “absolutely no doubt” that communities impacted were under enormous pressure.
Earlier, Hipkins flew to Gisborne for his first in-person look at the scale of destruction from the cyclone.
Hipkins said it “was a pretty moving morning”.
“Flying in over Gisborne is was clear the extent of the damage even before we’d gotten off the plane.”
It was clear there were big challenges facing the community, he said.
Communication was incredibly difficult for some people and both fibre routes in and out of Gisborne had been damaged with engineers working to repair the damage as fast as they could, Hipkins said.
Getting the water supply up and running would not be an overnight fix but was a prority, he said.
Hawke’s Bay update The government was trying to get hotspots and other temporary measures in place and 10 more Starlinks were on their way to Gisborne. Five units have been delivered to Wairoa and Hawke’s Bay, with more on the way.
Hipkins said there was a reasonably good supply of Starlinks in NZ.
“They’re not going to provide a complete answer though, but they will provide a limited amount of connectivity in those areas that are currently cut off and that will hopefully allow us to at least establish some of those basic communication channels.
“We’ve been able to reach Wairoa and Hawke’s Bay by road today and SH2 to Gisborne has also been opened on a limited basis for convoys of emergency supplies including food, water and fuel.”
Temporary supplies were on route and more would be arriving soon, he said.
“Fresh water is clearly an issue.”
There were real concerns for the Eskdale areas, Hipkins said.
Door-to-door
Teams were there going door-to-door to identify the extent of the damage and any human harm, he said. There had not been a report back from these teams yet.
People in Hawke’s Bay were advised to be prepared.
“We’re dealing with very unpredictable weather at the moment, it is certainly likely that there will be more rain, that’s what the forecasts are suggesting.”
The damage to roads in all areas was one of the most significant challenges and people in these areas were asked to minimise their own movements so supplies could get to where they were needed, Hipkins said.
“If you can stay put, stay put, make sure you’ve got everything you need to stay put if it’s safe to do that and if you need to evacuate be prepared and be ready to evacuate as well.
“That involves your grab to go bag, making sure you’ve got something warm and dry to wear and that you’ve got a plan.”
Communities were coming together and managing the situation very well, Hipkins said.
Alert others
People may need to go door-to-door to alert others if they need to evacuate, Hipkins said.
The most recent information is that approximately 102,000 customers are without power across the upper North Island.
Hipkins said the government had released $1 million as an immediate top up to the mayoral relief fund as the first step to help get immediate support to those who need it.
A further $1 million had been released to the Hawke’s Bay.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins . . . “We’re dealing with very unpredictable weather at the moment, it is certainly likely that there will be more rain.” Image: Nate McKinnon/RNZ
In December 1998, Fidel Castro addressed the 7th Congress of the Young Communist League in Havana, Cuba, a year after the catastrophic ‘market failure’ in Asia, when global finance exited the region and left behind economic deserts stretching from Korea to Malaysia. ‘The world is rapidly being globalised’, Castro told the Cuban youth, and this globalisation was ‘an unsustainable and intolerable world economic order’ founded on the cannibalisation of nature and the brutalisation of social life. Capitalist ideologues championed greed as foundational for society, but this, Castro cautioned, was merely an ideological claim rather than a statement drawn from reality. Similar ideological claims – such as those about the rational operation of markets – encouraged Castro to insist on the urgent need to wage a ‘battle of ideas’ to make the case for the richness of the human experience against the reductions of market fundamentalism.
‘Not weapons, but ideas will decide this universal battle’, Castro said, ‘and not because of some intrinsic value, but because of how closely they relate to the objective reality of today’s world. These ideas stem from the conviction that, mathematically speaking, the world has no other way out, that imperialism is unsustainable, that the system that has been imposed on the world leads to disaster, to an insurmountable crisis’.
That was in 1998. Since then, matters have become even more grave. In late January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists brought the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight, ‘the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been’. The self-described managers of the ‘world order’ (the G7 countries) who are responsible for this journey to annihilation continue to dominate the Battle of Ideas. This must no longer be permitted.
I am typing these words in Casa de las Américas in Havana, Cuba, which is the home of arts and culture not only for Cuba but all Latin America. Founded in 1959 by Haydée Santamaría (1923–1980), one of the pioneers of the Cuban Revolution, Casa became a reference for the necessity to advance class struggle on the cultural front. For Fidel, institutions such as Casa, with whom we collaborated for our dossier Ten Theses on Marxism and Decolonisation, are integral to this battle of ideas, to this confrontation with a vision of reality that is inimical to human progress. ‘Ideas are not simply an instrument to build consciousness and lead people to fight’, Fidel told the youth in 1998. In fact, ideas ‘have become the main weapon in the struggle, not a source of inspiration, not a guide, not a directive, but the main weapon of the struggle’. He quoted José Martí, the great Cuban patriot, as he often did: ‘Trenches made of ideas are stronger than those made of stones’.
In our dossier, thesis eight focused on the erosion of the collective life. As we wrote then:
Neoliberal globalisation vanquished the sense of collective life and deepened the despair of atomisation through two connected processes:
by weakening the trade union movement and the social possibilities that come within the public action and workplace struggle rooted in trade unionism.
by substituting the idea of the citizen with the idea of the consumer – in other words, the idea that human beings are principally consumers of goods and services, and that human subjectivity can be best appreciated through a desire for things.
The breakdown of social collectivity and the rise of consumerism harden despair, which morphs into various kinds of retreat. Two examples of this are: a) a retreat into family networks that cannot sustain the pressures placed upon them by the withdrawal of social services, the increasing burden of care work on the family, and ever longer commute times and workdays; b) a move towards forms of social toxicity through avenues such as religion or xenophobia. Though these avenues provide opportunities to organise collective life, they are organised not for human advancement, but for the narrowing of social possibility.
Red Books Day, one gesture to rescue collective life, emerged from the International Union of Left Publishers (IULP), a network of over forty publishing houses. On 21 February 1848, 175 years ago, Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto. The IULP picked that day, 21 February, to encourage people from around the world to go into public places, from the street to cafés and union halls, and read their favourite red books (including the manifesto) in their own languages.
Paolo C. Ratti (Italy), Lapidary Free, 2023.
In 2020, the first Red Books Day, more than 30,000 people from South Korea to Venezuela joined the public reading of the manifesto in their own languages. The epicentre of Red Books Day was in the four Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana, where the bulk of public readings took place. Peasant organisations affiliated with the Communist Party of Nepal held readings in rural areas, while the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil held readings in occupied settlements. In Havana, study circles met to read the manifesto, while in South Africa the Sesotho translation was launched and read for the first time. Left publishing houses from Expressão Popular in Brazil to Batalla de Ideas in Argentina and Inkani Books in South Africa also joined the effort. Many participants reported that this was the first time that they had opened a book by Marx and that the captivating prose has drawn them to start study circles of Marxist literature.
Due to the pandemic, Red Books Day 2021 was held largely online, but enthusiasm remained high nonetheless. The publishing house Založba (Slovenia) released a released a short film entitled Dan rdečih knjig (‘Red Books Day’), in which Založba’s writers read from the manifesto. Meanwhile, the publishing house Yordam Kitap in Turkey asked its authors to read from the manifesto in Turkish and organised a talk with Ertuğrul Kürkçü, a leader of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP). Small, appropriately distanced gatherings took place in Kerala, where the manifesto was read in Malayalam and English, as well as in Brazil, where militants of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) organised readings of the manifesto in Portuguese in their encampments. Not one corner of India was without Red Books Day events, as readings took place from Assam to Karnataka to Tamil Nadu.
Yoni Lingga (Indonesia), I Read Banned Books, 2023.
The highlight of Red Books Day 2022 was that half a million people in Kerala (India) read the books of EMS Namboodiripad in 35,000 meetings across the state. Various colleges in Perinthalmanna (Malappuram) held a three-day-long book festival, The Battle of Literature in the Era of the Ban, while the Purogamana Kala Sahitya Sangham (Association of Progressive Art and Literature) held programmes across Kerala. At the Vijayawada Book Festival in Andhra Pradesh, Prajasakti Bookhouse erected a popular Communist Manifesto book stall, while in villages in Maharashtra, night classes were held that reminded participants of the early days of the peasant movement.
Readings were held in Indonesia and Turkey, Brazil and Venezuela. Films were screened and music was sung while social media buzzed with the hashtags of Red Books Day in multiple languages. The South African shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo held a talent show on Red Books Day at the eKhenana occupation site. ‘The price for land and autonomy is always paid in blood. But struggle is not only shared suffering. It is also shared joy’, the organisation declared.
Zach Hussein (Palestine/United States), We Have a World to Win, 2022.
At dawn on Red Books Day in 2022, members of the neo-fascist RSS organisation entered the Thalassery (Kerala) home of Punnol Haridas, a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M). They hacked Haridas, a fisherman, to death. ‘I was supposed to write on my favourite red book today’, wrote V. Sivadasan, a member of parliament and CPI(M) leader, ‘but I ended up writing about my comrade who was hacked to death by RSS terrorists’.
In 2023, the fourth Red Books Day promises to build on previous years, fighting to rescue our collective life from the atomisation of precarious living.
Last week, a severe earthquake struck Turkey and Syria, taking the lives of more than 30,000 people so far, displacing millions in the region and plunging them into precarity. In Syria, US-led sanctions have delayed the delivery of critical international aid. Many also see the high death toll as a result of the Turkish state’s neglect. Following the devastation of the 1999 Gölcük-Marmara earthquake, an ‘earthquake tax’ was levied on the public, raising nearly $4 billion between July 1999 and July 2022. Yet, no clear evidence exists regarding how those funds have been spent and if they have gone towards emergency services and safety measures. In an attempt to rescue collective life in this terrifying moment, Ertuğrul Kürkçü of the HDP calls to ‘transform earthquake solidarity into a social movement’ against the prevailing neoliberal system. If you would like to donate to the relief efforts, you can do so here.
On one side of our world today are red books and the urge to expand the boundaries of humanity and left culture; on the other side are violence and bloodshed, the ghastly side of barbarism. Red Books Day affirms the culture of the future, the culture of humans. It is a crucial front in the Battle of Ideas.
Widespread damage has hit farms across Aotearoa New Zealand’s North Island with those in parts of Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay particularly hard hit and forestry slash is once again a huge problem.
Tolaga Bay farmer Bridget Parker told how forestry slash has caused a huge amount of damage to her farm yet again as the death toll from Cyclone Gabrielle rose to six.
“It’s enormous — there is silt all over the road. It’s so thick you can’t walk through it; there are logs as far as the eye can see,” she said.
“There are so many logs all the fences are down; wherever you look it’s total carnage.”
Parker, whose farm has been destroyed by forestry slash during storms multiple times, said they can look at forecasts for rain, wind, drought and even tides but they could not predict what was going to happen when it came to the logs.
“We don’t farm logs. Their logs [the forestry companies] and their friggin’ silt needs to stay inside their friggin’ estate gates.
“It does not have the right to be spewed over the 3000ha of beautiful land that is farmed on the flats below it.”
Parker said Minister for Forestry Stuart Nash needed to visit the region within the next week to answer to farmers.
“There’s floodwaters everywhere, in our house, in our sheds. It’s far higher than last time and we are really really struggling to cope; we’re really angry.”
Some of the slash on Bridget Parker’s farm in Tolaga Bay. Image: Bridget Parker/RNZ News
Hawke’s Bay area ‘smashed’ Forestry slash has also caused issues on farms in Hawke’s Bay where there was widespread flooding and slips.
Suz Bremner, who runs sheep, beef and friesian bulls along the Taihape Napier Road, said she had never seen damage like it.
“I tipped out the rain gauge this morning. It was overflowing at 170mm so we don’t know how much we’ve had.
“The power is out but from what we are hearing from people nearby is that the wider Hawke’s Bay area has just been smashed.”
Bremner said she went for a drive around her farm yesterday morning to assess the damage but roads were blocked by trees while tracks had been washed away.
“Looking at some of our neighbours who have big cliff faces on their properties the slip damage is horrendous.
“We have a road through the top end of our farm and we turned down there this morning and my husband and I could not believe our eyes. The slash that had washed down through the creeks is unreal; I’ve never seen that before.
“I think the forestry has come down and created a dam and then during the night it’s just exploded and now there’s slash everywhere,” she said.
Other farmers RNZ spoke to in Hawke’s Bay said they were hunkering down waiting for the worst of the weather to pass before getting out to assess the level of damage.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A fallen gum tree behind a ‘beware of falling branches sign’ in Mārewa, Hawke’s Bay. Image: Paula Thomas/RNZ News
As a huge effort ramps up in Aotearoa New Zealand to restore essential services to thousands of people in Tairāwhiti and Hawke’s Bay, police hold “grave concerns” for some reported missing.
Five people have been confirmed killed in the devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle.
In Hawke’s Bay, a child was caught in rising water in the settlement of Eskdale, a woman died in a landslide, a body was found on the shore at Bay View, and a body believed to be caught in flood waters was found in Gisborne.
The body of a volunteer firefighter who had been missing in Muriwai, near Auckland, since Monday night was recovered yesterday.
By Wednesday, more than 1400 people had been reported as “uncontactable” using the police 105 online reporting form, mostly in Hawke’s Bay and Tairāwhiti.
While police expected a large number of the reports to be the result of communication lines being down, they confirmed they held “grave concerns” for several people missing in the Hawke’s Bay and Tairāwhiti areas.
The navy ship HMNZS Manawanui is due in Tairāwhiti this morning with water supplies, and HMNZS Te Mana will sail to Napier to supply Wairoa with water and other essentials.
The NZ Defence Force expects to move a water treatment facility to Wairoa, and a rapid relief team that reached the town on Wednesday will be handing out up to 500 food packages.
Engineers and roading crews are checking bridges and clearing roads throughout both regions.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins is due to fly to Gisborne today in what will be his first in-person look at the scale of destruction from Cyclone Gabrielle.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
At least 2500 people have been displaced by Cyclone Gabrielle this week, says Emergency Management Minister Kieran McAnulty.
About 1000 of those are in the Far North and another 1000 in Hawke’s Bay. The rest are mostly from Auckland, with some also in Bay of Plenty and Waikato.
But little is known about the situation in the east, with communications minimal and access hampered due to continued high winds and rain.
Wairoa is of particular concern, with the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) “working very hard” to find out what is happening in the northern Hawke’s Bay region.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins (left) and Emergency Management Minister Kieran McAnulty . . . Cyclone Gabrielle is the most significant weather event in New Zealand so far this century. Image: RNZ News
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins, speaking to media yesterday with McAnulty, said the Telecommunications Emergency Forum “has been activated and is working closely with NEMA and local Civil Defence organisations”.
“The first priority… remains the restoration of regional cellphone signals. High winds and ongoing poor weather is hampering progress in that area.”
There has also been a fibre cut affecting Taupō, Hastings and Napier and other areas.
‘Completely isolated’ Wairoa only has one day’s food, Civil Defence says https://t.co/UBjWe4suda
Comparisons to Cyclone Bola Hipkins called Cyclone Gabrielle the most significant weather event in New Zealand so far this century.
“The severity and the breadth of damage we are seeing has not been seen in a generation.”
Manukau Heads Rd in the Awhitu Peninsula slice in half. Image: Hamish Simpson/RNZ News
Asked how it compared to 1988’s destructive Cyclone Bola, Hipkins said he “wasn’t around in this kind of role” then so could not immediately compare the two. Officials were still building a picture of the impact of the cyclone, he said.
“In the last 24 hours or so, Fire and Emergency New Zealand have 1842 incidents related to Cyclone Gabrielle in their system . . . Two-hundred defence force personnel have so far been deployed and there are more on standby.”
Transpower had announced a national grid emergency, following the loss of power to the Hawke’s Bay and Gisborne, with potential for extended periods of outages, Hipkins said.
“This is a very significant event for the electricity network and the companies have not seen this level of damage since Cyclone Bola . . .
“The situation is changing rapidly and the lines companies are expecting more customers to be affected. They are working to restore power as quickly as possible… but restoration in some parts may have to wait until weather conditions improve.”
Many supermarkets in Northland have been affected and closed. People were asked to only buy what they needed, Hipkins said, urging people to avoid non-essential travel. If it was unavoidable, people should let friends and family know where they were going, he added.
“A high number of roads have been affected by surface flooding and by slips.”
The latest available information is on the Waka Kotahi website, which remained the best source of information for anyone having to travel, Hipkins said.
“On behalf of all New Zealanders I want to extend all of our gratitude to our emergency responders. They are putting in the hard yards and their lives are on the line in the service of their communities.
“To the families of the volunteer firefighters who responded to events in Muriwai last night and to the wider Fire and Emergency New Zealand family, our thoughts and hopes are with all of you.”
“To the men and women of the Defence Force, the linemen and women, the communication companies, the supermarkets, the transport companies getting goods to where they are needed, the roading crews that are making that all possible, thank you to you also.”
Danger remains The good news is the weather is expected to ease overnight, Hipkins said. But that did not mean the danger would ease as quickly.
“People should still expect some bad weather overnight, particularly on the East Coast . . . as we know from experience over the last few weeks, even if the rainfall eases off a bit, more rainfall can compound on top of the rainfall that we’ve already seen.
“So when it comes to slips and so on, we could still see more of that even as the weather starts to ease. We’re still in for a bumpy time ahead.”
The prime minister declined to put a figure on what the recovery might cost, but said insurance companies would cover a “significant portion”.
“People will pick numbers out of thin air and they may be right or they may be wrong. It’s really too early to put an exact number on it.”
A slip across the road at Sailors Grave, near Tairua, during Cyclone Gabrielle. Image: Leonard Powell/RNZ news
He said it could impact on already fast-rising food prices, and would not rule out seeking international assistance.
Hipkins said something would definitely need to be done to lessen the risk of slash destruction in the future.
Climate change’s contribution As for climate change’s impact on the sheer scale of the storm, Hipkins rejected a suggestion that his actions since taking over as Prime Minister have weakened New Zealand’s efforts towards reducing emissions.
As a part of his policy reset, Hipkins canned a planned biofuels mandate and extended subsidies for fuel, a major contributor to warming.
“There is significant debate about whether the biofuels mandate was the right way of reducing our emissions from transport, when there are the other alternatives and other things that we can look at,” he explained.
“In terms of extending the fuel subsidies, we have to acknowledge that actually, there are people still having to get in their cars every day to drive to work, and we need to support them through what is a very, very difficult time at the moment.
“That does not in any way — I don’t believe — undermine our commitment to tackling the causes of climate change.”
He said Gabrielle’s impact would have “underscored” the need to keep reducing emissions.
“It is real, it is having an impact and we have a responsibility to do something about it.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Cyclone Gabrielle: Rural Hawke’s Bay residents scramble onto roofs to avoid flooding https://t.co/7qEDU7dSkh
A national state of emergency has been declared today after Cyclone Gabrielle unleashed fury across the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand.
There has been widespread power outages, flooding, slips and damage to properties.
Emergency Management Minister Kieran McAnulty said both the prime minister, and the Opposition spokesperson for emergency management were supportive of the move.
He said this was an unprecedented weather event impacting on much of the North Island.
This is only the third time in New Zealand history a national state of emergency has been declared — the other two being the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes and the covid-19 pandemic.
The national state of emergency is declared. Video: RNZ News
The declaration, signed at 8.43am, will apply to the six regions that have already declared a local State of Emergency — Northland, Auckland, Tairāwhiti, Bay of Plenty, Waikato, and Hawkes Bay.
A national state of emergency gives the National Controller legal authority to apply further resources across the country and set priorities in support of a national level response.
Speaking to media at the Beehive, McAnulty said Tararua District had also declared a state of emergency.
‘Significant disaster’
“This is a significant disaster with a real threat to the lives of New Zealanders,” he said.
“Today we are expecting to see more rain and high winds. We are through the worst of the storm itself but we know we are facing extensive flooding, slips, damaged roads and infrastructure.
“This is absolutely not a reflection on the outstanding work being done by emergency responders who have been working tirelessly, local leadership, or civil defence teams in the affected areas.
“It is simply that NEMA’s advice is that we can better support those affected regions through a nationally coordinated approach.”
He said the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) met with local civil defence teams early this morning and heard that a national state of emergency would be beneficial for them.
It allowed the government to support affected regions, coordinate additional resources as they are needed across multiple regions and help set the priorities across the country for the response, he said.
“Our message to everyone affected is: safety first. Look after each other, your family and your neighbours. Please continue to follow local civil defence advice and please minimise travel in affected areas.
‘Don’t wait for services’
“If you are worried about your safety — particularly because of the threat of flooding or slips — then don’t wait for emergency services to contact you.
“Leave, and seek safety either with family, friends, or at one of the many civil defence centres that have been opened.”
He said iwi, community groups and many others had opened up shelters and were offering food and support to those in need.
“I also want to acknowledge that there have been reports of a missing firefighter – a volunteer firefighter — who is a professional and highly trained but left their family to work for their communities and the search continues.
“Our thoughts are with the FENZ staff and their families.”
Acting Civil Defence Director Roger Ball said we have had multiple weather warnings and watches in place and the effects of the cyclone will continue to be felt across the country today.
He said that if other regions or areas declared local states of emergency, they would be added to the national declaration.
“Under a state of national emergency, myself as the director and my national controller have authority to direct and control the response under the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act, including allocation of resources and setting priorities.”
He said no effort would be spared.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins speaking at a media briefing today. Image: 1News screenshot APRFlooding on a main road near Waimauku in the Auckland region. Image: Marika Khabazi
Images of Hikuwai River bridge north of Tolaga Bay with the water level at more than 14m. Source: Manu Caddie FB
It has been a soggy few weeks for Aotearoa New Zealand’s upper North Island, with late January’s Auckland downpour and now, Cyclone Gabrielle.
States of emergency have been declared across Ikaroa-a-Māui, schools and non-essential services shut and public transport in the country’s biggest city running at a minimum.
“This summer just keeps on giving to the top of the North Island,” said Dr Dáithí Stone, a climate scientist with the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).
“Each summer, Northland and Auckland are usually on the verge of drought, with a pretty severe one experienced just three years ago. Not this summer.”
Cyclone Gabrielle . . . feeding off “unusually warm water in the Tasman Sea and around Aotearoa”. Image: Nick Monro/RNZ News
So what has changed? “Tropical cyclones feed off of the energy provided by hot ocean waters,” said Stone, noting recent summers — including the one we are in now — have seen “unusually warm water in the Tasman Sea and around Aotearoa”.
“This warm water is partly an effect of the warm ‘La Niña’ waters spanning the western tropical Pacific and partly some local ocean activities happening in the Tasman Sea, but the ongoing warming trend from human-induced climate change is playing a big role too.”
La Niña is an atmospheric phenomenon that usually happens every few years, when winds blow warm surface water from the eastern Pacific Ocean towards Indonesia.
In New Zealand, the result is “moist, rainy conditions” in the north and east of the country and warmer-than-average sea and air temperatures.
“Large-scale climate drivers (like La Niña) have elevated the risks of [a tropical cyclone] happening this summer,” said Dr Luke Harrington, a senior lecturer in climate change at the University of Waikato.
“In fact, seasonal predictions pointed to elevated chances of multiple [tropical cyclones] occurring in this region of the Pacific as early as October.”
Climate change cannot be blamed for Gabrielle’s existence — recent studies have suggested the globe’s warming is actually reducing the frequency of tropical storms in the Pacific — but the extra energy it affords systems could be making those that do form stronger.
“It’s likely that the low pressure centre of the system will be slightly more extreme than what might have been in a world without climate change, with the associated winds therefore likely also slightly stronger,” said Harrington.
Not many cyclones make it this far south intact, but the combined effects of climate change and La Niña are helping. Image: Mick Hall/RNZ News
Not many cyclones make it this far south intact, but the combined effects of climate change and La Niña are helping there too.
“The waters in the Tasman Sea and around New Zealand have been unusually warm,” said Dr Joao de Souza, director of the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment-funded Moana Project.
“The rate of warming has been above the global average since 2012-2013, with the last two years presenting record-breaking ocean temperatures leading to unprecedented marine heat waves around Aotearoa.”
As a result, Stone said extreme weather systems like Gabrielle “can maintain themselves much closer to us than before and are not disrupted so much by cooler seas that are no longer there”.
“La Niña events also change the winds, bringing more hot and wet air from the tropics our way.
“Finally, the warmer air of a warming world can hold all of that moisture until it meets the mountains of Aotearoa.”
More to come? And there could be more like Gabrielle on the way, sooner than you might expect.
“As the storm passes over New Zealand we see the ocean surface temperatures decrease as a consequence of the energy being drawn and surface waters being mixed with deeper, cooler waters. This is happening right now with Cyclone Gabrielle,” de Souza said.
“Once the cyclone moves away we should see the ocean surface temperatures rise again . . . All this means we have the pre-conditions necessary for the generation of new storms in the Coral Sea and their impact on New Zealand. And this situation is forecasted to prevail at least until April-May.”
The Coral Sea is a region of the Pacific between Queensland, the Solomons and New Caledonia.
The longer-term remains unclear, said Stone.
“Is Gabrielle’s track toward us a fluke… or does it portend the future? We do not really know at the moment, but NIWA, the MBIE Endeavour Whakahura project, and colleagues in Australia are developing techniques that we hope will help us answer that question very soon.”
Information for this article was provided by the Science Media Centre. It is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Another house done, and onto the next . . . Volunteers working in Mount Roskill community over the past few days helping those suffering from Auckland’s flash flood devastation have done us proud.
Tremendous work by everybody. Here are some random photos of our volunteer teams on the job.
Many Pasifika families affected by the flash floods and torrential rainfall that have lashed New Zealand’s North Island over the past few days were braced for more bad weather overnight.
With four people dead and hundreds forced out of their homes over the weekend a state of emergency remained in force for Auckland and one has also now been issued for Northland.
The predominately Pasifika neighbourhood of Māngere is among the worst affected areas in Auckland.
Streets throughout the suburb were submerged after torrential rain last Friday caused rivers to overflow their banks.
Māngere resident Louisa Opetaia said the water rose so suddenly that it rapidly flooded her entire home while she was still asleep.
“When I got home from work, I took a nap at about 7.30pm. When I woke up an hour later and I got off my bed, I splashed into water,” said Opetaia.
“It was already halfway up my calf and up to my knee, and the three rooms in my house were flooded,” she added.
Emergency centres were quickly set up, providing supplies and temporary shelter over the weekend and even now to the dozens of families displaced by the floods.
One of the busiest centres is the Māngere Memorial Hall in Manukau.
A flooded home in South Auckland’s Māngere. Image: Louisa Opetaia/RNZ
Auckland city councillor Alf Filipaina, who has been helping to organise relief efforts, said many families continued to arrive at the hall on Tuesday, requiring basic goods and household items ruined by the floods.
“Heaps of families have been affected and we’ve been working tirelessly,” said Filipaina.
“We’ve had all the groups here from KaingaOra, the Fono, Ministry of Social Development and others. They’re all here helping people,” he said.
“We’ll be open 24/7 for people who also want a roof over their heads.”
Auckland councillor Alf Filipaina at the Māngere Centre. Image: Felix Walton/RNZ Pacific
Filipaina said that some families were in a desperate situation, being forced out of their homes and having lost most of their possessions, including even their vehicles.
“There are people who need financial assistance,” said Filipaina.
“Some of them have lost everything, and we can only give what donations and goods that we have,” he explained.
The community response has been swift in Manukau with various agencies and good Samaritans donating goods and providing services, including from local heroes such as David Tua and All Black Ofa Tu’ungafasi.
“People are always offering to help,” Louisa Opetaia said.
“People have been taking our laundry to the laundromat for us, which is really helpful, and we’ve received a lot of food. That’s what I love about our Pasifika community in Māngere, everyone comes together when people need help.
“We were able to talk to Ministry of Social Development at the Māngere Memorial Hall. I’m not on the benefit so I wasn’t sure if I would qualify for any help but I do.”
Flood relief at the Māngere Memorial Hall. Image: Angus Dreaver/RNZ Pacific
Opetaia said she was now moving out of her house as it was too hazardous to live there.
She said the biggest challenge for her at the moment was getting rid of damaged furniture drenched and ruined by the floods.
“We are trying to get the council to help us get a skip bin so that we can throw anything that was affected by the flood waters, and we have a big pile of stuff at the moment,” Opetaia said.
“I understand that there a lot of people who are more severely affected than us. We do need help but at the same time we are grateful because we are in a better situation than others.”
Furniture damaged by flash flooding in Māngere. Image: Louisa Opetaia/RNZ Pacific
Meanwhile, according to the NZ Metservice many Aucklanders living south of Orewa may not see heavy rain last night — but localised downpours were still forecast for some.
Meteorologist Georgina Griffiths told RNZ Checkpoint that the key danger was rain falling on saturated soil making the region flood quickly.
But she predicted some parts of the city would escape a deluge.
Georgina Griffiths said Auckland was nearly out of the woods, with a drier weekend forecast and a dry week from Tuesday.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
It is unlikely that the Mayor of Auckland, Wayne Brown, took any lessons from the city’s devastating floods but the rest of us — and journalists in particular — could learn a thing or two.
Brown’s demeanour will not be improved by a petition calling for his resignation or media columnists effectively seeking the same. He will certainly not be moved by New Zealand Herald columnist Simon Wilson, now a predictable and trenchant critic of the mayor, who correctly observed in the Heraldon Sunday: “In a crisis, political leaders are supposed to soak up people’s fears…to help us believe that empathy and compassion and hope will continue to bind us together.”
Wilson’s lofty words may be wasted on the mayor, but they point to another factor that binds us together in times of crisis. It is communication, and it was as wanting as civic leadership on Friday night and into the weekend.
Media coverage on Friday night was limited to local evacuation events, grabs from smartphone videos and interviews with officials that were light on detail. The on-the-scene news crews performed well in worsening conditions, particularly in West Auckland.
However, there was a dearth of official information and, crucially, no report that drew together the disparate parts to give us an over-arching picture of what was happening across the city.
I waited for someone to appear, pointing to a map of greater Auckland and saying: “These areas are experiencing heavy flooding . . . State Highway 1 is closed here, here and here as are these arterial routes here, here, and here across the city . . . cliff faces have collapsed in these suburbs . . . power is out in these suburbs . . . evacuation centres have been set up here, here, and here . . . :
That way I would have been in a better position to understand my situation compared to other Aucklanders, and to assess how my family and friends would be faring. I wanted to know how badly my city as a whole was affected.
Hampered by deadlines
I didn’t get it from television on Friday night nor did I see it in my newspaper on Saturday. My edition of the Weekend Herald, devoting only its picture-dominated front page and some of page 2 to the flooding, was clearly hampered by early deadlines. The Dominion Post devoted half its front page to the storm and, with a later deadline, scooped Auckland’s hometown paper by announcing Brown had declared a state of emergency.
So, too, did the Otago Daily Times on an inside page. The page 2 story in The Press confirmed the first death in the floods.
I turned to television on Saturday morning expecting special news programmes from both free-to-air networks. Zilch . . . nothing. Later in the day TV1 and Newshub did rise to the occasion with specials on the prime minister’s press conference, but it seems a small concession for such a major event.
Radio fared better but only because regular hosts such as NewstalkZB’s All Sport Breakfast host D’Arcy Waldegrave and Today FM sports journalist Nigel Yalden rejigged their Saturday morning shows to also cover the floods.
RNZ National’s Kim Hill was on familiar ground and her interview with Wayne Brown was more than a little challenging for the mayor. RNZ mounted a “Midday Report Special” with Corin Dann that also tried to break through the murk, but I was left wondering why it had not been a Morning Report Special starting at 6 am.
Over the course of the weekend the amount of information provided by news media slowly built up. Both Sundays devoted six or seven pages to the floods but it was remiss of the Herald on Sunday not to carry an editorial, as did the Sunday Star Times.
It was also good to see Newsroom and The Spinoff — digital services not usually tied to breaking news of this kind — providing coverage.
“Live” updates on websites and news apps added local detail but there was no coherence, just a string of isolated events stretching back in time.
Inadequate information
Overall, the amount of information I received as a citizen of the City of Sails was inadequate. Why?
Herein lie the lessons.
News media under-estimated the impact of the event. Although there were fewer deaths than in the Christchurch earthquake or the Whakaari White Island eruption, the scale of damage in economic and social terms will be considerable. The natural disaster warranted news media pulling out all the stops and, as they did on those occasions, move into schedule-changing mode (and that includes newspaper press deadlines).
Lesson #1: Do not allow natural disasters to occur on the eve of a long holiday weekend.
Media were, however, hampered by a lack of coherent information from official sources and emergency services. Brown’s visceral dislike of journalists was part of the problem but that was not the root cause. That fell into two parts.
The first was institutional disconnects in an overly complex emergency response structure which is undertaken locally, coordinated regionally and supported from the national level. This complexity was highlighted after another Auckland weather event in 2018 that saw widespread power outages.
The report on the response was resurrected in front page leads in the Dominion Post and The Press yesterday. It found uncoordinated efforts that did not use the models that had been developed for such eventualities, disagreements over what information should be included in situation reports, and under-estimation of effects.
Massey University director of disaster management Professor David Johnston told Stuff he believed the report would be exactly the same if it was recommissioned now because Auckland’s emergency management system was not fit for purpose — rather it was proving to be a good example of what not to do
Lesson #2: Learn the lessons of the past.
The 2018 report did, however, give a pass mark to the communication effort and noted that those involved thought they worked well with media and in communicating with the public through social media.
Can the same be said of the current disaster response when there “wasn’t time” to inform a number of news organisations (including Stuff) about Wayne Brown’s late Friday media conference, and when Whaka Kotahi staff responsible for providing updates clocked-off at 7.30 pm on Friday?
Is it timely for Auckland Transport to still display an 11.45 am Sunday “latest update” on its website 24 hours later? Is it relevant for a list of road closures accessed at noon yesterday to have actually been compiled at 7.35 pm the previous night? Why should a decision to keep Auckland schools closed until February 7 cause confusion in the sector simply because it was “last minute”?
Lesson #3: Ensure communications staff know the definition of emergency: A serious, unexpected, and potentially dangerous situation requiring immediate action.
There certainly was confusion over the failure to transmit a flood warning to all mobile phones in the city on Friday. The system worked perfectly on Sunday when MetService issued an orange Heavy Rain Warning.
It appears that emergency personnel believed posts on Facebook on Friday afternoon and evening were an effective way of communicating directly with the public. That is alarming because social media use is so fragmented that it is dangerous to make assumptions on how many people are being reached.
A study in 2020 of United States local authority communication about the covid pandemic showed a wide range of platforms being used and the recipients were far from attentive. The author of the study, Eric Zeemering, found not only were city communications fragmented across departments, but the public audience selectively fragmented itself through individual choices to follow some city social media accounts but not others.
In fact, more people were passing information about the flood to each other via Twitter than on Facebook and young people in particular were using TikTok for that purpose. Media organisations were reusing these posts almost as much as the official information that from some quarters was in short supply.
Lesson #4: When you need to communicate with the masses, use mass communication (otherwise known as news media).
Mistakes will always be made in fast changing emergencies but, having made a mistake, it is usual to go the extra yards to make amends. It beggars belief that Whaka Kotahi staff would fail to keep their website up to date on the Auckland situation when it is quite clear they received an enormous kick up the rear end from Transport Minister Michael Wood for clocking off when the heavens opened.
Or that Auckland Transport could be far behind the eight ball after turning travel arrangements for the (cancelled) Elton John concert into a fiasco.
After spending Friday evening holed up in his high-rise office away from nuisances like reporters attempting to inform the public, Mayor Brown justified his position with a strange definition of leadership then blamed others.
Sideswipe’s Anna Samways collected a number of tweets for her Monday Herald column. Among them was this: “Just saw one of the Wayne Brown press conferences. He sounded like a man coming home 4 hours late from the pub and trying to bull**** his Mrs about where he’d been.”
Lesson #5: When you’re in a hole, stop digging.
Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications — covering both editorial and management roles — that spans more than half a century. Dr Ellis publishes the website knightlyviews.com where this commentary was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
Auckland mayor Wayne Brown is under fire for calling New Zealand journalists “drongos”, blaming them for having to cancel a round of tennis with friends on Sunday as the city dealt with the aftermath of record rainfall and flooding that left four dead.
A producer for MediaWorks news station Today FM on Saturday said Brown turned down an interview on Friday morning because he wanted to play tennis instead.
WhatsApp messages leaked to The New Zealand Herald showed rain got in the way, with Brown telling friends on Saturday morning it was “pissing down so no tennis”. Despite being freed up, the interview did not go ahead.
And on Saturday night, Brown told the WhatsApp group — known as ‘The Grumpy Old Men’ — he couldn’t play on Sunday either because “I’ve got to deal with media drongos over the flooding”.
Brown asked the Herald not to write a story about the messages, calling them a “private conversation aimed at giving a reason to miss tennis”.
“There is no need to exacerbate a situation which is not about me but about getting things right for the public and especially those in need and in danger.”
He also turned down Morning Report‘s request to appear on the show on Tuesday morning. His deputy, Desley Simpson, did call in — saying she was “happy to talk to you at any time”.
Auckland’s deputy mayor Desley Simpson with mayor Wayne Brown (centre) . . . she says she is “happy to talk to you [media] at any time”. Image: RNZ
“My understanding is the mayor is on the ground, and has been over the weekend,” she said, not directly addressing criticism he wasn’t communicating effectively.
“I think as his deputy I am more than happy to do that role. I’m talking to you now, I’ll talk to you at any time. That’s my commitment to you and to Auckland.”
Asked if it was acceptable to call journalists “drongos”, Simpson again avoided the question.
“Media play an important part, in my opinion, in helping get our message out. I really appreciate talking to you this morning so that we can inform Aucklanders what they need to do to be prepared for the storm . . .
“My focus, and I think all local boards and other councillors — and the mayor — our focus is making sure that Auckland is prepared for this afternoon and this evening. It’s going to be a rough 24 hours, and I really appreciate you helping us get this message out.”
She then said she had not seen Brown’s texts, she had been busy “getting myself ready this morning with emergency services and stuff for this afternoon”.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
New Zealand’s Northland . . . “red” warning to prepare for a deluge. Image: RNZ News
Appreciated the chance to speak with @abcnews about the resilience and generosity of so many in the community supporting whanau during these distressing times. The local leadership on show has been magnificent. pic.twitter.com/PJ4hItwjxx
Greenpeace claimed today claimed New Zealand’s extreme rain and flooding crisis in the North Island at the weekend as a “climate disaster”.
“As our friends, family and neighbours across Auckland and the North Island have been battered by unprecedented rain and flooding, it’s a visceral reminder that climate change is upon us right now,” the environmental watchdog said in a statement.
“We need to band together as communities through this disaster, then collectively demand more climate action from our politicians,” said Greenpeace spokesperson Amanda Larsson.
“Climate change is already impacting us, and people are paying the price. It’s not enough for politicians to talk about climate change, they must also act to prevent further climate chaos by cutting climate heating gasses and adapting society to become more climate resilient.
Larsson said the unprecedented rain and flooding that had hit over recent days — a record 249mm fell in 24 hours on Friday causing four deaths — was not only a “terrible sign of things to come” but a visceral reminder that climate change was upon New Zealand right now and a clarion call for more action.
“The science is clear that the vast volume of climate-heating gasses now in our atmosphere due to fossil fuels and industrial agriculture is driving the intensity and frequency of extreme climate events like this,” she said.
“We need to see the authorities name this for what it is — a climate disaster, and then act to mitigate by cutting climate heating gasses and to adapt by designing more climate resilience into our society,” said Larsson.
Climate rescue plan
In his first week on the job, Greenpeace called on Prime Minister Chris Hipkins to adopt a three-point climate rescue plan which included regulating dairy, electrifying transport and keeping oil and gas in the ground.
“We have seen important acknowledgement from Prime Minister Hipkins and the Emergency Management Minister McAnulty that climate change is a driver,” she said.
“Once the immediate risks from the North Island floods have been managed, we need to see meaningful action by this government to actually cut the climate pollution that drives the climate crisis.
She added that while opposition National Party leader Christopher Luxon had acknowledged the catastrophic event by saying ‘Climate change is real,’ this was a “total disconnect” from his party’s plans to reinstate offshore oil and gas drilling.
“These climate floods are a visceral reminder of the need for politicians to take real action to cut climate pollution. Lofty statements and far-off targets are not going to stop the climate crisis.
“We need courageous action to regulate the worst polluters.”
