Steely resolve of flood-hit hamlet
In a new series, Herald journalists went to small town New Zealand to talk to voters about their hopes, fears and dreams. Each day we visit a town beginning with one of the letters H, E, A, R and T. Today, Jamie Morton visits Edgecumbe
Charelle Stevenson tells a story she reckons sums up her little Bay of Plenty town. It happened in the days after that bright blue morning of April 5, when a cyclone-swollen Rangitaiki River spilled through a breached stopbank at a rate of 100,000 litres per second and put Edgecumbe underwater.
Charelle’s brother, Kyle, had a home in riverside College Rd, which bore the brunt of the deluge.
A local contractor had to remove his front gate to widen the road.
Another resident drove by, assumed the gate was being stolen, and rushed to the local bakehouse to warn Charelle.
When she arrived back at the Main St building supplies company she runs with dad Gary, the contractor was there, dropping off the gate.
“Everyone knows each other here . . . even on my street, which is pretty private for Edgecumbe, we don’t need a neighbourhood watch.”
Today, the town, a tidy cluster of homes and warehouses set against a lush green dairy hinterland, framed between the peaks of Whale Island and Putauaki, is as quiet and peaceful as it ever was.
On a late winter afternoon you could shout at the top of your voice and be heard almost from one end of town to the other.
But all around town lie those reminders of a calamity that hasn’t loosened its grip on the 1700-strong community.
Most of them are brightlycoloured: engineers in high-visibility vests, yellow stickers on windows, orange road cones, the words “no go” spray-painted upon a wrecked house’s facade.
A high mesh-fence stretches along past those worst-hit College Rd houses, which have just been bought by the state.
Marilyn Kearns and husband John, who rescued a paraplegic neighbour minutes before a wall of water gushed across the road, have left town for nearby Kawerau.
They’d lived here for 18 months, become part of the community, and would loved to have stayed. “Everybody is so friendly here.” She said it was a tragedy the plucky town had been struck down at a time it was on the rise — maybe even for the first time since half its houses were left twisted and damaged by the 6.3 earthquake of 1987.
Unemployment and crime was down, there were few empty shops, rentals were hard to come by and houses for sale changed hands quickly.
Retired couples and young families had been moving in, lured by affordable homes a short drive from Whakatane, fishing at Thornton Beach, or the exploding number of new jobs down the road in a revitalising Kawerau.
Healthy dairy payouts funnelled cash into town, boosting farm supply companies, the SuperValue supermarket and other shops in Riverslea Mall.
Edgecumbe has long been bluecollar: its median income stands at about $23,000, registered labourers far outnumber managers, and most work in manufacturing.
But if more land was freed up for development, Charelle believed Edgecumbe could have had a population boom like Papamoa.
Businesses are still trying to make up for the time they spent out of action — even for just the nine days that residents were painfully kept from their houses and stores.
“I’m not going to say that people are upbeat, because they’re not,” said Charelle, who chairs the local community board.
Months on, residents are still wrangling with insurers.
Some had discovered too late they had no cover at all and others, like John and Marilyn Kearns, had left town for good, moving out of the district, or out of the country.
“People keep asking me, how can we help, what’s the need in Edgecumbe, and I say it’s changing every fortnight,” Charelle said.
“A good example is EQC shutting down sites after finding asbestos: people need advocacy and they don’t know how to deal with those agencies.
“I do think there are people out there who are close to breaking point, but I also think, in general, our community has been very resilient.”
Asked how successive governments’ policies had affected Edgecumbe, she said it had always been the agricultural sector — the Fonterra plant employs a fifth of the population — and local business that really drove town’s destiny.
Her own firm, Peppers, adapted to the impact of the floods by reaching further out of the area for business.
Some smaller firms had been forced to close.
While the Government put up a $700,000 support package to help about 100 companies in town, owners had been frustrated over trying to meet the criteria to access it.
“There are so many variables they didn’t look at: we’ve got staff popping out to meet assessors all of the time, so we’ve been underresourced at times,” she said. “We met informally within a group a couple of weeks ago and asked our Chamber of Commerce advocate some really hard questions . . . there were some really angry business owners.”
There was still anger over what caused the flood in the first place — and particularly whether any failings by the district or regional council had played a part.
Graeme Bourk, a College Rd resident who has lived in the area for half a century, suspects it was more good luck than good management that no one was killed.
After the floods in 2004 and 2005 ruined many homes, Bourk said the community had been promised there would never be a repeat.
“But it’s happened again, and 10 times worse.”
For now, locals have put their faith in an independent inquiry, focused on the river flood scheme and being led by former finance minister Sir Michael Cullen.
If people were not happy with the outcome, Bourk said he would have a legal attack plan ready to go.
“There are a lot of angry people in the town and I’m encouraging them to just keep the pot boiling, because once they let it go, it will be hard to get it back again.”
But that unbreakable sense of community was holding fast, and helping people to carry on.
Charelle plans to spend the rest of her life in Edgecumbe.
She likes the fact that people mix together at the local pub and wants daughter Ari, 3, to have the humble, happy childhood she did.
“She can walk to school and play sport afterwards because she doesn’t have to catch the bus. And I can go and watch her in cross country . . . that’s always resonated with me.
“I mean, I own a home here, I’m part of a family business here, and I can see opportunities for Edgecumbe to move forward.
“The crux of it is there are good people in Edgecumbe, and it’s a caring community.”
People keep asking me, how can we help, what’s the need in Edgecumbe, and I say it’s changing every fortnight. Charelle Stevenson