Tasman's rural resilience tested by back-to-back storms

I didn't mean to get caught up in another perilous storm, when I set out for the Tasman region last week to record stories on how farmers were coping after June's devastating flooding.

Rural communities fresh from the first catastrophic deluge were in the midst of preparing for a second, when I finally got through flight delays and road blockages.

Heavy low clouds hanging ominously over Nelson Airport were a sign of things to come, when I finally landed late afternoon. Less than 24 hours later, a second State of Emergency was declared.

I headed straight for the Motueka Valley, keen to get a story or two in the can, before it got dark.

Sandra Young was waiting for me with her niece and nephew. They were standing under an umbrella, beside a flood-flattened paddock.

I'd seen her social media posts a few days earlier, showing her Motueka River West Bank Road property totally consumed by floodwaters.

Her beloved animals had earlier been moved to a dry stable above the paddocks, but they weren't safe for long. The water just kept on rising.

"We had five minutes to get them out [of the stable]," she said. "It was up to their knees and, within 5-10 minutes, it was up to the horse's chest and the alpaca's neck."

She said other farm animals in the valley weren't so lucky.

"There was a beautiful horse called Star up the river and everybody was praying he was all right, but he was found washed up on a beach. It's just heartbreaking."

I asked her where her animals were now: "They're locked in the stable again, ready for tonight's deluge."

She detailed a desperate rush to move combusting hay bales, wet and muddy from the rain, and others smashing through paddocks "like torpedoes".

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I travelled further up the valley, along roads slick with silt and debris from the vegetation, to find cattle farmer Vicki Adnam.

The land along the river looked like a bombsite, when I got there in the stormy half-light. Silt covered the paddocks, trees were upended, and most of the fences were flattened and tangled up with debris.

Adnam said her two-storey house was a metre under water during the flood. Her tenanted cottage had moved off its foundations and has since been red-stickered.

"We were upstairs here and it was just raging around us, and downstairs, the water was coming in."

Jacob Lucas who works for Nelson Marlborough Fish and Game had organised a group of local anglers to help with the initial clean-up at Adnam's farm.

"A lot of the fences have been completely flattened," he said. "There's debris all through them, so it's just trying to remove some of the debris, clean up the wire."

On Friday morning, the weather had taken a turn for the worse, but I managed to get to Kevin Freeman at his dairy farm on the aptly-named Rainy River Road at Atapo.

He showed me a damaged bridge and paddocks that looked bare, after losing all their fertile topsoil to the flooding.

The rain was steadily getting heavier by the time I got to the Frys' farm on the Kaharu-Kawateri Highway. The family were doing a big clean-up after the first floods.

"There's everything out there - cactuses, bricks, trees, containers, plastic," Andrew said. "It's amazing how much has come down the river."

Brown floodwater still covered all the land between the Motupiko River and their farmyard, and had left a carpet of silt in the office and sheds.

The Frys' award-winning hop garden was damaged and a combine havester had died, after being submeged in two metres of water.

"It's going to cost the business a lot of money," Andrew's father told me grimly. "I guess it'll be triple figures, so we need good years, because of bad things like this."

As we stood there, mulling over the damage, the call came through another bad deluge was on its way, and Andrew and wife Laura - both volunteer firefighters for Tapawera - headed out again.

For the full story, head to this week's special feature on Country Life.