A Gisborne family’s harrowing Cyclone Gabrielle experience has been captured on film.
It starts with the sound of heavy rainfall. A home zooms into view. It’s night time and clearly something is very wrong. Brown river water has flooded the property, covering every surface. It’s lapping at the side of the house, the garage, the spa pool. On a clothesline, sheets that were drying in the sun during the day are now soaked, dangling in rapidly rising floodwater.
The camera swings around and captures something startling. A woman is standing in water up to her chest. She’s distraught, in shock, inconsolable. If she seems to have lost everything, that’s because she has. There’s no audio but she seems to be screaming at the water, telling it to stop, to leave her and her family alone. But it just keeps coming.
That woman is Rachel Daly. When Cyclone Gabrielle hit Gisborne, the home she’s shared with her husband Clint and their two teenage children for the past seven years was inundated with water. After helping their kids escape, Rachel and Clint returned to attempt to save their two cars and gather what they could.
Suddenly, the water was up to their chests. Inside, the couch and fridge began to float.
“None of us saw it coming,” she says. In the time it took to move their cars, the floodwater rose from “waist deep to neck deep” in parts of their Grant Road home. Overcome with emotion, the helplessness of it all, Rachel stood in the water and started to cry. Her husband Clint pulled out his cellphone. He was in shock. He wasn’t thinking about the danger they were in.
It all happened so fast. “We were trying to capture as much as we could.”
Those are the opening moments of a six-minute documentary unveiling the last three weeks of the Daly’s lives. Their home, sandwiched between Grant Road Reserve and the Waimatā River, was completely flooded from both sides. Aside from some photos and clothing that was stored up high, almost everything they own has been ruined and needed to be thrown out. “We’ve lost everything we’ve worked our lives for,” says Clint.
Their home is red stickered, meaning they can’t return. They don’t want to. “From what we have endured we never want to go back to the property again,” says Rachel. She was last there three days ago and it was “toxic … all surfaces contaminated with silt which contains local sewage, chemicals from the Waimatā River farms and other hazardous materials including forestry slash which has ripped through our property”.
Much of what used to be their front yard has been reclaimed by the river.
The documentary, directed and produced by local videographer Haimona Ngata, captures them in a fragile state. The couple are seen returning to their home after the floodwaters recede, tying to rescue precious items like wedding photos and the surfing trophies won during Clint’s competition days. The magazines he starred in are all ruined. “It doesn’t feel real,” says Rachel at one point. “It’s just a day at a time at the moment.”
Rachel and Clint are both real estate agents, and they know how precious a home can be. In time, the happy memories of their Grant Road home will return. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” says Rachel. She’ll remember their pool parties in the backyard, offering their children’s friends a second home, and of “entertaining family, friends, Christmas days, fishing on the river”. It was, she says, “just an awesome place to live”.
But before that happens they have to pick up the pieces. They’ve only just moved out of Rachel’s mum’s garage and have found a two-bedroom unit to rent in for the meantime. They haven’t yet returned to work, and don’t know when they will.
One thing’s for sure, they won’t be going back to Grant Road in a hurry. “Our whole family has been traumatised by this event and we will never make our children go back there,” says Rachel. “What happened that night was so scary … It doesn’t interest me at all to ever open that door and go back there again.”