Drone shows owners bach damage

A Marlborough Sounds resident has been doing her holiday-home neighbours a favour by getting, and sharing, drone photos of the flood damage.

Kenepuru Rd resident Amanda Rudkin was dropping her children off to school in Waitaria Bay when – from her boat – she realised the ‘‘enormous amount of land movement’’ in a lot of the bays.

‘‘We need to share this,’’ Rudkin told her husband. ‘‘Because imagine if we were away, and you are seeing pictures of slips, you are hearing a bach is going down the hill, you are hearing of all of this, and nobody can get to your property.’’

Rudkin started sharing the pictures on a Kenepuru Facebook group and was quickly overwhelmed with thanks and requests. A farmer asked her to fly her drone over his remote property to check if a light was still on to see if he still had power.

‘‘There are such major faults on the road and slips and dropouts and cracking, nobody can get anywhere ... So really the only option to get around is if you’ve got a boat in the water or a boat already in Havelock.

‘‘We have been easily able to do that over the last few days, and we will carry on.’’

The couple and their two children moved from Christchurch to what used to be their holiday home in Te Mahia Bay in December last year. They bought a drone after the flooding in July last year destroyed Kenepuru Rd. The road was still being repaired when the rain started last week.

There were a few more parts of the Kenepuru Sound that Rudkin hadn’t got to, she said, ‘‘so we’ll do that over the next few days’’.

Seeing images of the Marlborough Sounds this week, Christchurch

resident Craig McInnes was pretty worried for his property near Portage.

‘‘Obviously we can’t get up there to check on the place at the moment, so it was great to have Amanda volunteer and go around capturing images of properties, and we could ask her to get specific ones of our one, to check that it hasn’t slipped into the sea or anything like that.

‘‘From what we can see, the house looks absolutely fine, there is possibly one small slip . . . but it looks good as gold from the photos It was quite moving actually just to see those [images] come through during work time [on Monday].

‘‘I suddenly started to contact other neighbours who I knew were on Facebook and I could pass on the images of their homes, and they were thrilled to be able to get that peace of mind when living away from the Sounds to know that their place is OK.’’

McInnes hoped to get up to Marlborough to check his property properly in the next 10 days.

‘‘My heart sank for the people who live here because we are on the Facebook page, and we see the to-ing and fro-ing and the difficulty to get the road fixed from the storm last year, and just to think, ‘Oh my goodness, we’re going back to square one again’, it’s heartbreaking,’’ McInnes said.

The Marlborough District Council announced on Monday it would underwrite barge services into the Kenepuru and Queen Charlotte Sounds to assist residents impacted by the flood.

The subsidy would run in partnership with Johnson’s Barge Service Limited, in Havelock, and Kenny Barging in Picton.

Johnson’s barge logistics and officer manager Kim Weatherhead said the weather event was more widespread than last year’s damage.

‘‘It’s made it a lot more difficult to help people because a lot of the areas where we would generally pick up and drop off vehicles and help them out, people can’t even get to them, so we’re doing a lot of individual beach rescues.

‘‘And there are a few areas that we simply can’t access,’’ Weatherhead said.

An aerial shot of Te Mahia Bay, taken by residents Amanda and Tim Rudkin after heavy rain at the weekend.