Life on the frontline of climate change: ‘Patch it up’ and another storm rolls in
When Cyclone Gabrielle ripped through the Waiapu River catchment near Ruatoria, it was just the latest in a long line of destructive storms that are slowly making life unlivable. Tony Wall reports.
Graeme Atkins stands in what was a prime farm paddock six weeks ago, but now resembles an alien landscape of contoured mud. ‘‘It’s death by a thousand cuts,’’ he says, describing how the river has widened by hundreds of metres over the past few years, ‘‘gobbling up our best land’’.
Cyclone Hale in January carved off large chunks of farmland, brought down slopes and left hundreds of tonnes of forestry slash on the nearby Te Wharau beach.
Then came the even more powerful Cyclone Gabrielle, just adding to the destruction and the feeling that things can’t go on like this.
Atkins, a Department of Conservation ranger who has won awards for his protection of rare plants, lives with his family on Ma¯ ori land that borders the ocean on one side, and the Waiapu River on the other.
During Cyclone Gabrielle, ‘‘we opened up the back window . . . and you could hear the ocean with the seven-metre swells . . . and a deafening roar, then you’d open the windows at the front of the house and you could hear a different roar, of the river bank to bank’’. He says it was a terrifying night, but people in his district are ‘‘seasoned veterans’’.
‘‘We’ve had so many floods. We’ve got damage on this road back to Ruatoria that’s from about six storms ago. It’s just patch it up and another storm rolls around.’’
Atkins says poor land use choice from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when native bush was cleared from the hills to make way for pastoral land, is ‘‘coming back to haunt us today’’.
That, and poor forestry practices, he says. After Cyclone Bola in 1988, pine planting was encouraged to protect fragile soils from erosion.
The trouble is, Atkins says, the trees all reached harvest age at the same time.
‘‘Now you’ve got whole slopes that have been clear-felled, left exposed to these weather events.’’
He takes me down to the beach, where millions of tonnes of logs, known as slash, have washed up. It’s a shocking sight.
In among all the debris, Atkins has found the carcasses of pigs, sheep, deer, possums – even some wild emus that lived in the district.
Some of the wood is dry, from previous storms, but there’s tonnes of new debris washed up from the latest cyclones.
‘‘Like you get dirt rings on the bath, we got bloody cyclone rings on this beach,’’ Atkins says. ‘‘We can’t even get down to our kaimoana because of all these logs. No other beach in the country would put up with this, so why should we?’’
Driving back past the river, Atkins points out an area where, back in the 90s, he planted about 4000 pine trees to stop the
river encroaching on farmland. ‘‘Now, we’re lucky if there’s 200 left – all the rest have gone down the river. It eats away at the base of them and they just topple in.’’
He says it’s been estimated that 36 million tonnes of sediment washes down this catchment each year, ending up in the sea.
‘‘Every time there’s a flood, more and more height is added to the riverbed, and it means it takes less and less water for it to come over its banks.
‘‘There’s no more deep channels in the river any more to handle high flows.’’
He remembers as a kid, climbing down the river bank to go swimming, the distance of a couple of power poles.
‘‘Now . . . the riverbed is level with the truck window as you drive by.’’
Atkins’ says while there is a place for forestry in the area, owners have to clean up their practices. It’s a complex issue though.
‘‘Our iwi [Nga¯ ti Porou] has got vested interests in the carbon farming side of it, earning credits from the forests that we own.
‘‘They just need to change their practices as far as clear-felling steep slopes, they’re gonna have to do it in little sections – don’t do the whole lot all at once.
‘‘Everything we do now has to be through the lens of landscape protection. All the water courses need to have some sort of vegetation along them, I’m talking not just in the forestry, but farms as well.
‘‘No drainage systems can cope with the way rain falls out of the sky these days.’’
Atkins says a petition was started after
Cyclone Hale for a commission of inquiry into forestry practices, which he thinks has to happen.
‘‘We lost a young boy in Gisborne during Cyclone Hale [involving slash], if that doesn’t provide the motivation to do something, what does?’’
And people living in his valley need to have some ‘‘serious conversations’’ about what happens next.
‘‘You can’t just keep making a new road every time it pisses down, it costs money.’’
He and the 25 or so families along his stretch of road were cut off for three days after Cyclone Gabrielle.
‘‘Our eldest daughter wants to build a house out here, it breaks my heart that I have to tell her to hold on, because how are you going to pay your mortgage if you can’t go to work, with no road?
‘‘Another storm will come along. You can pretty much bet we’re gonna get another storm before the end of summer.’’
‘‘Every time there’s a flood, more and more height is added to the riverbed, and it means it takes less and less water for it to come over its banks.’’
Graeme Atkins