‘Rain valley’: The flood-damaged community where everyone else is worse off

Going by the stoic residents of Rai Valley, you’d think hardly any damage was done. But the landscape tells a different story. Matt Hampson spent a day in the cut-off community.

There was no teaching at Rai Valley Area School on Wednesday. The school remained closed, but a group of local volunteers were busy in the kitchen preparing hot meals and food parcels for people in the surrounding area.

Devilled sausages were on the menu, and volunteer Joanie Benge said 42 hot meals would be delivered to houses, along with food parcels, by the end of the day.

“It means someone will be turning up and supplying them with food today. We’re also giving them coffee … something that’s a surprise for them that will be appreciated,” she said.

The volunteers, who had organised themselves through a Rai Valley community Facebook group, had been cooking meals at the school since Saturday.

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“We started delivering to the immediate village, and then expanded out to the wider area,” she said.

The flood damage had been “just devastating” to residents in the Rai Valley area, but Benge said the people were “awesome”, saying “it’s such an amazing community of people”.

“It’s an absolute privilege to work for a team and community like this,” she said.

Rai Valley was still cut off, with slips either side of the township on State Highway 6, after days of torrential rain at the weekend. Renwick to Havelock had reopened, but past Havelock was residents-only.

The main highway between Blenheim and Nelson, along with the alternative, SH63, would be closed until at least next week.

A few kilometres south of Rai Valley on SH6 in the Pelorus area, a Fonterra milk tanker from Canterbury was arriving at the property of dairy farmer Geoff Shearer.

It was the first time milk had been picked up from his farm since the road closed a week ago, and Shearer said he had been forced to “dump” several tanks of milk.

“It’s probably the worst time of year for this to happen – we’ve got calving, and so cows calving have to be milked,” he said.

The driveway to his property had been badly damaged, and the flooding had “wiped out all the fences” from the front of the property, but Shearer said “we’re probably better off than most people”.

“Some [farmers], the land got destroyed with the floodwaters. I guess we’re a bit more fortunate, we’ve got plenty of high ground,” he said.

“The farm just down the road there, probably lost 20% of its land, just through silt and rubbish going across, which means they’re going to have to get 20% of their cows off.”

Farmers in the area had “grouped together” to help each other clean up their properties, Shearer said, and there had been “amazing community support”.

“Everybody working together, which is neat,” he said.

“The school and marae have been cooking meals for us, that’s been just incredible.”

Shearer said Fonterra had organised a group of people to come up from Canterbury to help the farmers in the Pelorus and Rai Valley areas to clear and rebuild their fences.

“They’re brilliant in a disaster,” he said.

Another dairy farmer, Greg Thompson, was helping move livestock from his son’s farm in the Opouri River area on Wednesday.

The swelling of the river had caused damage to farms in the area and the road that connected them, which had been made accessible to 4-wheel-drive vehicles on Wednesday.

“The biggest thing has been trying to move animals,” Thompson said.

His youngest son, also a farmer, got caught in the river on Thursday last week trying to rescue animals from his farm that had ended up in the river.

“My youngest [son] got caught in the flood – he’s got pneumonia in both lungs – he’s pretty crook,” he said.

After being taken to Wairau Hospital in Blenheim, Thompson said his son was already back on the farm, clearing flood damage on the property. He was nowhere to be seen on Wednesday.

“He probably shouldn’t be doing anything now, but he’s all dressed up, and he’s got the heater going in the digger,” Thompson said.

“It’s just a flood, it’s just Rai Valley.”

At a farm across the road, Pam Harvey, who had lived there since 1978, said they still had no land line or cellphone coverage on Wednesday.

“That rain was not like other rain. We have a lot of rain here, but this was over several days,” she said.

“It’s rain valley – we’re the source of Marlborough’s rain.”

On Friday, from 4.30pm to midnight, the farm’s rain gauge “overflowed,” recording nine and half inches of rain. Harvey said the gauge was reset at midnight, and by the time she checked it the next morning, the gauge had recorded another nine inches of rain.

The Tunakino Valley, northeast of Rai Valley, received a metre of rain by 5pm, Saturday.

Though the property itself had largely escaped any significant damage, and the farm hadn’t lost any livestock, Harvey said they went without power for two days and were forced to rely on their generator.

“We’re living by the day,” she said.

Her son Tim Harvey, who had lived at the farm his entire life, said they had “never had a four-day flood before”.

Though the water had been higher in other floods, he said the rain this time left “everything so, so saturated”.

“It’s done a lot more damage because of the saturation level of everything, that’s why there are more slips [and] there’s way more river damage,” he said.

By the third day of rain, it “started to get a bit depressing”, he said.

“Just seeing how much land [was] being washed away and the destruction, but we’ve fared a lot better than a lot of others,” he said.

As “the next flooding could be next week”, he said it was important keep stock of animal health supplies, have food supplies, and have your own generator.

He said the community had rallied together over the past week, saying “that’s where that rural spirit has come into play”.

Justin Morrison, who lived in the Ronga Valley, said he had a knock on his door at 3.30am on Saturday morning from a pair of neighbours who had managed to escape their house, before it slid several metres from the hill onto the road.

The neighbours, who Morrison said were a man and woman in their 70s, had walked “half a kilometre down the road” to his house, “in the rain and through sodden paddocks”.

“They had a bag of clothes with them, but it had got pretty wet in the transit, so we loaned them some clothes, they put some dry clothes on, we put the jug on and had a cup of tea,” he said.

He said the man had woken up around 2.30am from an “initial shake from the land moving above their property”.

The next morning, Morrison said they drove to see what damage had been done, and he said his first reaction seeing the house lying on the road was “holy s…”.

“They were pretty shocked,” he said.

Further towards Nelson on SH6, on the Marlborough side of the Whangamoa Saddle, chunks of the road were missing, and there were still fallen trees and several slips to be cleaned up.

Farmer Marc Nightingale and his family lived on Kokorua Rd, located within the Whangamoas, a property Nightingale had lived at for almost 40 years.

Residents in the area had cleared most of the slips on the road themselves, using their own diggers and tractors, Nightingale said.

“You’ve got to get access somehow, you’ve just got to dig yourself out,” he said.

He said their house had gone without power for two days, forcing his family to cook their meals on a wood fire oven, and on Wednesday this week he said they still couldn’t use their land line, as a pole that provided them with coverage had fallen over.

“There was no way to communicate with anyone that we didn’t have power,” Nightingale said.

He said he was still trying to contain his livestock after the fences on his property needed repairing due to the flooding, and he said most farmers in the area had already “burnt through” their stock of animal feed.