Our village in crisis: How Muriwai came together after its worst week
It’s Thursday, a warm evening. A summer’s evening, the kind we expect, or used to expect, in February. There is sunshine spilling across the perfect, billiard-table green of the first tee at Muriwai. A long convoy of cars, snaking down the coast road from above the gannet colony, has been heading to the car park for the past hour; they are all locals, thanks to police at the cordon high on the ridge, who check your status as you drive slowly past.
By 6pm, several hundred Muriwai residents are milling about, queueing amicably and gratefully for free food and drink.
The Muriwai Golf Links is not a ‘‘posh’’ place like some other courses in the city, but its location, a three-wood away from the whitecaps on the most beautiful beach in Aotearoa, makes it a peerlessly stunning spot – it’s enough to make you want to take up the sport.
It’s my local beach; shared with neighbours and friends, their dogs and horses, and on a hot Sunday, just about all of Auckland.
If you didn’t know better, this might be a normal summer picnic; a chance for the community to gather for a beer and a chin-wag. But the way people are greeting each other – with strong, lingering hugs, and tears – tells you different.
The same conversation is duplicated over and over throughout the crowd: how is your place? Much damage? Sometimes the answer is so catastrophic, it sparks wordless head-shaking and fresh tears. In those moments, our gaze is dragged without thinking to the middle distance, where the hillside at Motutara Rd is just a kilometre away. It bears long, wide, landslip scars from clifftop to roadside. It’s too painful to look at for long.
We’ve been asked to gather so experts, brought out by Auckland Emergency Management, can explain what is going on in our precious part of the world; what the coloured stickers posted at the roadside and at front doors mean; what is happening under our feet as we take brooms and rakes and chainsaws to the mess.
There’s too many people to fit inside the clubhouse all at once, so the briefings are split into three. The mood is sombre and there are questions, some of them unanswerable. We hear that slips might widen, and loose boulders are a threat; that 164 houses have been seen by rapid assessment teams and, of those, 39 are too dangerous to enter. The police cordons can’t be maintained forever and some in the crowd are worried about looting.
There is a spontaneous and emotional round of applause for Fire and Emergency District Commander Brad Mosby as he speaks about Dave van Zwanenberg, the much-loved local vet and volunteer firefighter who perished under a slip on Monday.
At this stage, it’s likely few in the room know that his colleague, Craig Stevens, equally adored in the community, had also passed away in hospital that very evening. That news, which comes Friday morning, is overwhelming.
By lunchtime Friday, residents in one of the most unstable streets would be told to leave their belongings and evacuate their homes immediately after signs that the ground under their houses was on the move.
I’ve been here less than two years, which means I’m only a newcomer, but I keep being pulled back to Auckland’s west coast as if by an invisible string. I lived seven years at Piha in the 1990s – another idyllic coastal village brought low by this terrible event. Just as at Muriwai, that community is rallying, everything put aside to help those who’ve lost everything.
Facebook – a platform I do not engage with much, as in normal times it’s mostly a trash-fire – is a particularly good performer in these slices of time, where people who have stuff to give can connect easily with people who need stuff.
Scroll through the local pages of hard-hit areas – if you can get online – and you’ll see dozens of people opening their homes to affected families and offering space for animals (a crucial consideration in rural areas) and some quite stunning creative thinking. Like the tiny-house construction business that’s furnished units in its Kā meu yard with donations of mattresses and gas bottles, from a thread of more than 80 commenters, and is welcoming families in need.
Or the Waimauku coolstore business offering to wrap and store the contents of your freezer until the power is on again. The rugby club, open for showers and phone-charging; the many, many businesses with generators running, offering power and internet to anyone who needs to continue working. The mental health counsellors offering free sessions for those who are simply overwhelmed.
And those more prosaic things you might not think about in the middle of the tumult: a PO Box to redirect your mail to, dog runs and cat cages on loan for those who’ve had to flee to temporary accommodation. One poster asks for a portacot, a onesie and a sleeping bag for a 2-year-old – just for a night – after the latest evacuation order. It’s heartbreaking.
Friday there is sunshine again, which is a blessing, as the sound of any rain on the roof would put us all on edge.
Power restored, the surf club is back in action as a relief centre with sleeping spaces, food and showers for the newly evacuated. The golf club has hundreds of precooked meals at the ready. Dinner is on the house at an upmarket local winery and a plush wedding venue has opened its door for all comers to shower, work, recharge.
Kindness is all around but so is anxiety.
This is an ongoing tragedy – and my community will know that there are others, elsewhere in the country, who’ve also lost everything. But as dusk falls at the end of the most traumatic week for Aotearoa in years, we also know it is not over yet – not even close.
‘The same conversation is duplicated over and over throughout the crowd: how is your place? Much damage? Sometimes the answer is so catastrophic, it sparks wordless head-shaking and fresh tears.’