Summer Focus
The storm flooding was terrible but the crisis also led to a deluge of community spirit for those who live around Nikki Macdonald in whiro Bay.
Over the next three weeks while Sunday Magazine takes a summer break, you’ll still be able to find your favourite features in our expanded Summer Focus section: Finding community spirit
Books and essays
At 9.44am, water split wood and splintered glass. It smashed the front of Chris and Maggie’s house. It shattered Ben and Lynda’s front door and invited itself in. Richard needed five stitches after being put through a spin cycle in his garage. Sucked-out fishing gear bobbed like pool toys in the bay.
My partner Mike caught our dislodged letterbox before the tumble of ocean dragged it back out. He was too late to grab the two palings ripped off our front gate. We found them two days later, 1km away.
It was three weeks into lockdown, but the sea takes orders from no-one, enveloping the coast in a crushing embrace.
While houses and garages were rent apart, a community came together.
It was only April, but it had already been a crappy year. Literally. Since New Year, poo had been emptying into our precious marine reserve, carried by the whiro Stream.
Cross-contamination, Wellington Water said. We’re fixing it, they said. But still the safe swimming website branded angry red no-swim circles over whiro Bay.
That was the first time we heard the name Eugene Doyle. He demanded better reporting, so we’d at least know where the poo was concentrated. And when Wellington Water effectively told us to get used to it, he said that’s not good enough. When he made so much noise that the Wellington Water chief executive came to visit, he organised an ambush of concerned residents to coincidentally wander by.
Then there were the turd taxis rumbling past every six minutes, wafting rancid air into living rooms and backyard BBQs. They carried sewage sludge from the Moa Point treatment station to the landfill, after a pipe gave out.
And then Covid rearranged our universe. We’ve always had great neighbours – we’d swap baking and bread with Ben and Lynda and their four-year-old Eve would throw toys for our barking dog.
On the other side, Grant would lend his practical genius to any problem that emerged with our rusty, rotty 90-year-old cottage.
But that was about as far as it went. Until lockdown turned our worlds into suburbs and our suburbs into our worlds.
On March 29 – four days after level 4 kicked in – Eugene emailed with an idea. He wanted to set up a network of bay helpers, in case vulnerable people needed a hand. He called us the mavens.
I’ll admit I was sceptical. I hate meetings, and their inevitable time-suck. But it felt good to do something.
We met for the first time in a scratchy Zoom room. Someone divided the streets and assigned everyone a clutch of houses, so we could be a point of contact if anything went wrong. We set up a WhatsApp chat channel.
When we took the dog on our daily escape from house arrest, we looked past the teddies to the people at the desks and dining tables inside, trying to match faces to their pixelated Zoom renditions.
Eugene would chat from his balcony. There was
Sue, who runs the residents’ association, Dave and Sharon and Mina and James, who help with the penguin nesting boxes. There was Chris and very-pregnant Maggie. And Jess from up the road, who helps with the stream clean and planting.
We’d wave, or stop for a socially-distanced chat, as we inevitably crossed paths on the daily stride-out along the carless streets.
And then, on April 15, a southerly swell rose out of a blue sky day and smashed our little community, and our Covid bubbles.
At 8.45am, I sat on our deck, in the captain’s chair fashioned from an old wagon wheel, and videoed the first waves sloshing over the sea wall onto the road, choking the drain with sticks and sand. The swell was mesmerising. Fat green rollers iced with spume, unruffled in the still air, unlike the normal wind-whipped rooster tails.
It must be high tide, we thought, refreshing the MetService website in disbelief when it kept saying high tide was still two hours away, at 11am.
Across the bay, residents were making the same calculation.
Having had no warning, we were completely unprepared. Between waves, there was a collective scuttle, moving cars, securing garages, laying sandbags. Some random guy with a spade tried to clear the drains. No-one understood the seriousness of the threat.
Lynda drove their car around the corner, to dry ground. It was then that the water turned to concrete. My last video stopped dead, after the f-word, as the mountain of wave kicked house-high, smashing in my garage door, shattering Ben and Lynda’s front door, and barrelling into five houses across the bay, forcing their evacuation.
Caught running back from the car with Eve, Lynda stared at the street that was now a river. Mike ran to help, hoisting Eve aloft. ‘‘Does that mean I’ll get the virus?’’ Eve asked her mum later.
Within minutes, neighbours were out helping Maggie and Chris and their little girl. Within half an hour they had offers of places to stay.
The WhatsApp group began chiming. Who was OK? Who needed help? We dredged up an old door from our garage that fitted Ben and Lynda’s frame. Paul from across the bay came to hang it.
Someone donated plywood to board up the busted windows, busted doors, busted garages. The cavalry coalesced on the worst-affected properties, bearing shovels.
There were Sue and Paul. Maybe Mina – she looked different in real life. Another pair of hands I didn’t recognise. If your house was OK, you helped. Bugger the bubbles. Sorry Jacinda, but in the hierarchy of risks, crisis tops Covid.
There are some upsides to having a tip on your back doorstep. On the Saturday, Simone and the crew from the Construction and Demolition Landfill turned up with a front-end loader. Truckload after truckload of sodden furniture and smashed wood was carted off, for free. They’re part of our community, too.
I’ve always thought we’re a bit of a weird bunch, with our hotchpotch of houses and wild weather. But when crisis strikes, you realise there’s strength in difference. We have painters, builders and air-con specialists; doctors and lawyers; thinkers and doers. Eugene is a thinker extraordinaire. Within five days he’d done the council’s job for them, organising a Zoom debrief. In the midst of full lockdown, he rounded up experts from NIWA, cops, councillors and residents to understand what went wrong.
And people listened. Within two weeks, a new wave warning system was up and running. Now, when Ōwhiro Bay speaks, people no longer tell us to just get used to it.
It’s been a crappy year, but when 2021 rolls around we won’t wipe the slate clean. Instead, we’ll look back at all the fresh tendrils of connection that now bind the bay. We’ll remember Eugene, standing up for us, again and again.
We’ll remember Sue shovelling sand clown remember from fish our suit Paul driveway, at hanging the midwinter Ben and and bobbing swim. Lynda’s in We’ll her door Nemo and firing up braziers on the beach.
We’ll remember Nick and Tracy opening their home to the wave-helper thank you party, when the weather wrecked the outdoor venue plans.
And we’ll wave our way around the bay at the strangers who’ve become fast friends.