Gabrielle begs the question of how, and if, to rebuild

As people dig houses from the silt, a national conversation is emerging over how to mitigate for the new climate normal

- Tess McClure

It was a tsunami from the hills. It was bigger than the tides. The noise – it was like Huka Falls.” Rikki Reed gazed at the wall for a moment, and you got the impression he could still hear the sound of water flooding into Esk Valley. His five-year-old son, Parker, sat nearby, quietly playing.

Reed was part of a night-time road crew that came in to help when Cyclone Gabrielle struck – blocking off parts of the state highway, where huge trees had fallen. At around midnight, as waters started rising fast, they began evacuating people – but then he realised the truck he was in was stranded. “There were waves over the highway. The rapids were on both sides,” he said.

Sitting in the marooned truck, he took a moment to write a message into his iPhone notes app, a farewell to Parker. As the truck filled with water, he climbed out, into the branches of a nearby tree. Water roared through the valley. The first tree snapped in half, but Reed grabbed on to another. He clung to that trunk for hours, up to his neck in water, knowing if he climbed any higher the trunk might be too thin to bear his weight, and he would be carried away.

“I just held on there all night thinking about him, his smile,” he said quietly, nodding toward Parker.

Reed’s home was flooded, and he doesn’t yet know when he can return or what its future will be. As a worker on drainage infrastructure and catchments, he has thought about the valley’s vulnerability to flooding, and the changes that might be needed to protect it. “We definitely have to rethink. If you look at the way the valley’s shaped, that’s where water has been – so it’s not the first time.”