Part-time cleaner’s Nelson fire heroics
How did a part-time cleaner find herself running a 400-person volunteering effort to help people affected by the Nelson fire? Joel MacManus investigates.
Like most of Nelson, Saxton Field is a dustbowl. The vast sports fields look not just depleted, but angry. The grass is an aggressive orange hue; loose, dry grass and dirt whips along when hit with a strong gust, and the heat emanates from the ground.
Look out onto football fields that haven’t seen water in weeks and there’s an eerie feeling. But in one small corner of the grounds, it’s bursting with life.
At the Saxton Suburbs Football Clubrooms, cars stream in and out of the carpark, while worker bees decked out in hi-vis march in three directions at once carrying boxes of essentials.
A guard stands at the door, checking everyone coming in. He tells us to go find Marg.
Inside, it’s all action. Everywhere. Long tables are heaving with food.
A small production line create packed lunches. Two guys lug boxes into a shipping crate freezer, while another speedwalks boxes of bottled water around into the changing rooms.
Two young women in Red Cross overalls usher people this way and that, a girl in a school uniform rushes about restocking shelves, and at a small table four women are filling out piles of paperwork and spreadsheet.
At the centre of all of this is Marg Goff. She is an unassuming middle-aged woman. She doesn’t work for Civil Defence or run emergency response services. Marg is a part-time teacher aide, and works as a cleaner at the football clubroom to supplement her income.
Despite all the organised chaos that fills the room, her role is immediately obvious. She’s a natural leader, and people flock to her for guidance. She points a volunteer in one direction, and tells another to take a break.
It takes a while to get her attention; she is pulled off to a meeting, then she has to go see to a family which has just come in.
‘‘Literally, they’re just broken,’’ she says. ‘‘They walk in the door and they can’t handle it. It’s now affecting more and more people. We’ve got forestry workers who can’t do anything. They’ve got no money coming in, they can’t feed their families.’’
The story of how she ended up leading a 400-person community support operation that supplied firefighters with essentials and helped countless Nelson bushfire evacuees shows that old adage is true: Some people have greatness thrust upon them.
THE CRISIS BEGINS
In the afternoon of Wednesday, February 6, it became apparent that the smoke rising out of Redwood Valley wasn’t going away anytime soon. It was getting bigger, and it was getting nasty.
Community Facebook pages in Nelson were flooded with outpourings of support. People wanted to pool together and donate food and supplies, but there were no official operations up and running and nowhere for them to donate to.
As a cleaner, Marg had keys to the clubrooms, which are in an ideal location on the boundary between Richmond and Nelson City. So she ran it by the club and opened up the rooms to let people drop off items.
20-year-old Josh ‘‘Scoutboy’’ O’Donnell and 19-year-old Josh ‘‘Bartender’’ Richards were the first to arrive. They’ve been here ever since, taking more than a week off work to be here for more than 12 hours a day as lead volunteers
‘‘We got here that afternoon, we had 10 volunteers and no food and thought ‘what are we going to do?’’’ says Richards. ‘‘Then the food started coming in, and it hasn’t stopped coming in since ... It was like a tsunami of stuff.’’
The first few days were chaos. Nelson firefighters weren’t set up to feed as many personnel as they had on the front lines.
Calls came in from heart of the action as Fire and Police tried to keep their front line teams fed. The Rotary club in Redwood Valley started co-ordinating food orders. When the Rabbit Island fires broke out, some firefighters and support staff in the middle of a 30-hour shift had no food, until Marg’s team managed to get a carload of boxes out to them.
On Friday, New Zealand Defence Force chefs were deployed to run catering for emergency services, but it didn’t slow down at the clubroom, because then the evacuation call came for Wakefield. People who had been displaced, who had no access to food or had to spend their budget on emergency accommodation started streaming in.
Through Friday, Saturday and most of Sunday, there were as many as 100 volunteers in the clubrooms at once, some helping families retrieve food, others arranging the freezers, sorting out orders, working in the kitchen, and running administrative duties.
Marg and her team estimate they had around 300-400 volunteers in total, and helped at least 300 families in need.
It got so big that Marg had to start turning volunteers away. One volunteer working in the freezer said she had come down twice already before she finally had been given a job to do.
People coming through to donate food were stopped at the carpark to reduce the amount of chaos inside.
HARD WORK AND SACRIFICE
More than a week after Marg began running the operation, she’s still going at a 14-hour-a-day trot. Her only day off was Monday, when Nelson Mayor Rachel Reese made her team stand down and take a break. Sport Tasman stepped in to run the centre for the day.
Marg won’t take breaks unless her fellow volunteers force her to. She also hasn’t been able to go work – and that’s been tough. As a teacher aide, she hasn’t been getting paid all summer, and now that has been delayed even further. She’s had to take food home from the welfare centre just to feed her own family.
But she wont accept sympathy. She just points to others who had it worse.
‘‘We had a woman and husband come in and volunteer. Four months ago they lost an infant baby. Then, they were evacuated because they lived in Wakefield. They had a business, which they couldn’t get food in to run. Everything was escalating for them. Yet they were in here, volunteering for others.’’
Richards pipes up with another story. ‘‘We had a family who had lost their house just a few weeks ago in a house fire here in Stoke. They had absolutely nothing, but they came down and volunteered. So when the father left, we made sure to send him home with some food for his family as well.’’
As the week wore on, less people were coming in, but the cases that were got tougher. As the crisis continued, it started affecting more people, and the damage started accumulating. Families still couldn’t return home. People were out of work. Farmers had animals and pets dying from the smoke.
The impromptu welfare centre had to expand beyond food. Counsellors and victim support advocates were brought in to assist people, and support people helped evacuees access disaster support money through WINZ.
‘‘We’ve got so many people coming here, because we’re community,’’ Marg says. We’re not in uniforms, we’re not authority. We all know someone in Wakefield, so we’re like family. That’s why they’re gravitating here I think. They just want friendly faces that they know.’’
LEADERSHIP RECOGNISED
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern gave a specific shout out to Marg at her media standup on Thursday.
‘‘Marg was one person that was specifically mentioned to me. I just think it’s incredible that when you have a community as tight-knit as this one, that when they see a need they fill it, and often at a scale that is just extraordinary. I imagine I am just one of many that would like to express that sincere gratitude.’’
Hearing that quote, Marg beams and grasps the hands of a fellow volunteer. ‘‘Oh my god, really? Wow,’’ she gasps. ‘‘That’s the Prime Minister. Holy cow!’’
But of course, it’s not the credit from powerful people that inspires that work that Marg has done.
‘‘The look on their faces when they walk back out the door and they’ve got a feed in their tummy, they’ve had a hot drink, someone who’s prepared to listen to them, and seeing what they can take home for their families. The smiles, they are so relieved and so thankful they’ve actually got food. That’s the best part,’’ she says.