A profitable silver lining in Cyclone Bola’s clouds
Kate Taylor
Cyclone Bola had a huge effect on the fertility of the Tolaga Bay plains.
talks to a couple who farmed in the aftermath of the storm that changed the East Coast.
The smell of burning sheep carcasses stayed with Tolaga Bay farmers Bruce and Nicki Jefferd long after Cyclone Bola’s floodwaters had receded.
They remember the March 1988 storm like it was yesterday – from leaving their house to the mercy of floodwaters in the middle of the night through to pulling sheep from the metres of silt that covered their farm. The rain started on Sunday, March 6 and the main flooding happened from overnight Monday.
They had 500 millimetres of rainfall at the house that added to the 900mm that fell in the hills. By Wednesday, the Jefferds had lost 35ha of crop and about 2300 sheep, including 1100 ewes.
‘‘We got out on the farm in the tractor. We were advised by council authorities to clear all the dead animals … to put them in piles and to burn, which in hindsight was a stupid idea because their wool was soaked and did not really burn. It was a horrible smell. It stayed with us for a long time,’’ Bruce says.
He grew up on a family farm on Mata Rd, Tokomaru Bay, and has been farming in Tolaga Bay since his 20s. He and Nicki have sheep, cattle, cropping and an expanding orchard on 250ha at Tolaga Bay and another block three kilometres away at Wharekaka. They remember being worried about the welfare of the neighbours that night, but didn’t think their own house was going to flood. Then the river broke and started filling up the Tolaga Bay basin.
‘‘This was about 9 at night,’’ Nicki says. ‘‘We saw the water and it didn’t look good. It wasn’t surface rainwater anymore. It was dirty and flowing fast. It was coming up one step into the house about every half an hour. We started lifting things, went outside and got the dogs out then opened gates for stock. I saw the white-face hereford cows swimming to a bank.
‘‘It was 11 when we left the house, knowing we were in a bit of trouble, but in some ways it was good that we left, it was scary, but it meant we couldn’t attempt to do anything in terms of rescuing stock because of the added risk of it all being at night. It would have put us in much more jeopardy if it had been in daylight.’’
They evacuated also because they had elderly Canadian cousins staying with them.
‘‘If it was just us we might have tried to stay.’’ They stayed the night with about 20 other refugees at a nearby house well above the flooding.
‘‘We woke up the next morning and there was water everywhere.’’ It was still raining heavily when they went back to the farm, although the floodwaters had started to recede. ‘‘It was still pretty swift and waist deep walking in from the road to the house,’’ Bruce says. ‘‘Our dogs were high and dry in the ute on the corner overnight but the house had about 18 inches of water through it so we couldn’t do anything. ‘‘The first job was to check animals … see what needed rescuing. There were a lot caught up in fences, plus cows and calves standing on higher dry ground.
They spent the next day rescuing what sheep were still alive.
‘‘There were so many caught in the silt and digging them out was really hard going. We just ignored the house and sheds and got on with helping or retrieving stock.’’
They were also share-farming angora goats. ‘‘Some bucks in the yards drowned but some females were perched up in the lombardy poplars – clever girls.’’
While photos of Bruce and his dead sheep appeared in newspaper coverage of Bola, his own attempt to record the devastation on that first day struck a snag. He was so overcome with emotion that he didn’t notice the film on his camera wasn’t winding on. ‘‘I would have had some amazing photos that morning.’’
For the Jefferds, Bola’s timing couldn’t have been worse.
‘‘Sweetcorn crops were days away from picking and unable to be harvested.
‘‘We lost a lot of sheep that were drowned against fences. They had longer wool. Sheep that are shorn can swim a little bit. It was unfortunate timing for us – all the ewes that would generally be in the hill country had been brought down to draft up for the rams.’’
Amid all the chaos, a local council officer turned up, but not to help. ‘‘He had the gall, in his suit and black shoes, to come and tell us some of the residents near the block at Wharekaka were complaining about the dead animal smell. Oh my God, we couldn’t believe it. We’d spent the whole week moving dead carcasses. We were going as fast as we could and we weren’t the only ones. It was soul destroying. We worked in a state of shock for a few days.’’
‘‘We didn’t think too much, we just got on with it,’’ Nicki adds.
Bruce says the tide mark on the trees was well over the cab of his tractor so stock in those areas had been in big trouble. And the silt was so deep it left fences half their original height. But that had a silver lining.
‘‘The pH of the silt that washed over the flats was 7 or more and we had 5.2 or 5.3 before that, so we had terrific cropping years for a while. We’re still getting some of that benefit, even now.
‘‘The lack of organic matter was the only downside to the silt … that takes time to build up. Some of the terraces are a bit weak in trace elements but as a whole, you look out there and you just forget what happened to it.’’
The farm also inherited weeds on the flats that it didn’t have before Bola, such as variegated thistles and Bathurst burr.
Tolaga Bay’s flats are generally valued at about 40 per cent of other flats in the Gisborne district.
‘‘Following Bola there was a lot of negative sentiment about the Tolaga Bay flats. As time goes on that negativity is dissipating.
‘‘It is one of the few areas of sizeable alluvial flood plain in New Zealand that doesn’t have a stopbank system. In some respects that is probably a good thing. Stop banks are big trouble if they are breached. I know Manawatu has had trouble with water getting in behind stopbanks.’’
Nicki says while farmers did get warnings about the impending cyclone, modern weather warning systems are far better now than they were. ‘‘We’re so much better at reading what could be coming. It is so easy to get a map of the weather and where a low is tracking to. Bola has been a yardstick. We’ve had flooding here before and haven’t batted an eyelid too much but because of what we went through. After Bola, in any big easterly storm I would get so anxious, anticipating what could happen. Time is a good healer.’’
‘‘We’re better in terms of shifting stock as well,’’ Bruce adds.
‘‘The day before Bola wreaked havoc I did move stock when we got the warning but left those on the lower terraces. We’d never had a flood go any higher.’’
The farm slowly recovered. The land looked like a moonscape through March and some grass was poking its head through the silt by early April.
They welcomed the quick announcement of government assistance.
‘‘Farming returns were pretty low. A lot of guys in the back country that had been hit hard had to just walk away. The help we got was amazing. For us, the package put my cashflow where it would have been without the flood. We didn’t have a lot of fence repair, maybe $20,000-$30,000, but some people were more than double that. Our lost income came from dead animals and lost crops.’’
Volunteers turning up to help were great moral support.
‘‘People would just turn up and ask what they could do to help. They’d say ‘we’re two electricians from Wellington or I’m a plumber from Hawke’s Bay or we’re farmers, what can we do to help?’ It was overwhelming.’’
‘‘We couldn’t do anything in the house until the water had gone,’’ Nicki says. ‘‘But when it did go, the local fire brigade cut holes in the floorboards and hosed all the silt out. We were back in the house within a week before any of the main repair work was done, which was before we should have been but there weren’t as many regulations then. Rats had lost their natural habitat, so we had to share the house with them for a while,’’ she says with a grimace. ‘‘But by August, I guess we were starting to get back to normal.’’
Six months later the farm was ticking over reasonably well. ‘‘Some paddocks where the silt was really deep we didn’t touch them until spring – October, November – and used maxi-till across them where it was shallower. A lot of seed was flown on by helicopter or plane.’’
Bruce says they’re committed to farming in Tolaga and have added more flat land to the business since Bola. The business has more intensive sheep and cattle finishing as well as cropping.
There’s an element of surprise about the length of time that has passed since Cyclone Bola made its mark on the East Coast. ‘‘It’s hard to believe it has been 30 years but we learnt a lot of valuable lessons,’’ Bruce says.
‘‘It changed the district and the region in so many different ways. Much of the steeper hill country has been planted in radiata and that now has an economy all on its own. If we ever had another flood of Bola’s magnitude it would be interesting to see if the pine trees would prevent the large scale erosion that occurred in Bola. I have my doubts.
‘‘I just hope we, or for that matter any other part of New Zealand, never has to deal with that sort of rainfall and the resulting devastation again.’’
People would just turn up and ask what they could do to help ...
Bruce Jefferd