Never a Day Like It, and lived through

BY CLIVE LIND

First came the mournful wailing of the civil defence siren. Then came the urgent hammering on the front door about 4am.

I'd arrived home from work just after 11pm. It had been an exciting night for news. Rain was bucketing down, there was severe surface flooding in places, houses and garages were being pumped out, some people were being evacuated. Friday's paper was going to be a good one and it was clear Invercargill, if not the province, was facing some really major problems if the rain continued.

And it had all night. The din on the roof was incredible.

The door knocker took priority. A soaking wet Chris Destrieux, a reporter who lived 200 metres away at the end of Arthur St, was standing there.

"We're being flooded," he said. He was holding some documents and valuables. Could he leave them with us for safe-keeping as he and his wife battled to lift their furniture?

For the previous few hours, the French-born South African and his wife Michelle, who met while he was on a Rotary Exchange to Invercargill a few years earlier, had watched water rising and rising before entering their home.

"It was the most extraordinary feeling of helplessness," he recalled for this publication.

"At least with a fire, you can fight it. But we could do nothing."

What followed was a scramble as they lifted furniture on to bricks from a chimney they were demolishing, until they realised the water was winning and they had better work out what documents, photographs and other valuables needed an immediate safe haven. Then he waded out and made his way to our house.

I followed him home, through his gate and up to my upper thighs in water. Lesson No1 when covering floods: Wear shorts or togs, not long pants.

At 5.30am, I was at work at The Southland Times, in Esk St, after first driving through a centimetres-deep torrent of water rushing across Dee St near Avenal St.

Friday, January 27, 1984, was going to be busy.

In those pre-cellphone, pre-web and pre-email days, the best way of learning the extent of the floods was listening to our radio-telephone as drivers and others told each other what they were doing.

The airwaves were busy and dramatic. We had one reporter on the job already, not that I knew it. Michele Poole had been on the late shift on January 26. She had covered the early dramas.

As the situation worsened and events unfolded, Michele had inside knowledge her mother, Eve, was mayor of Invercargill.

She and the mayor shared a routine Michele would call her mother and try to wind her up by mimicking a disgruntled ratepayer on some issue of the day.

About 11pm, based on what she'd been reporting, she tried it again: "Mrs Poole, I voted for you. I have water coming through my front door. What are you going to do about it?"

When she eventually got home about 1am, any jokes were over. She learned a crisis was looming and a state of emergency was about to be declared. She drove her mother through water to the city council's offices, and then through more water to get a council worker to man the phones.

At daybreak, the city was effectively split in two with the Otepuni Stream rampaging. It was time to work out how many staff lived on the south side of town, and mightn't be able to get to work.

But one by one, they drifted in, and the sheer hard work of covering what had happened began.

It was the weirdest of working environments. The inner city was dead. Shops and offices were closed. Nobody was about. We were hungry but there was nothing open. Fortunately, the Kelvin Hotel provided a cooked lunch, better than our normal fare.

Chief photographer Owen Jones was in the thick of it.

"I do remember working very long hours," he recalled, "and seeing some horrific sights ... houses with the water over their roofs." There was no respite on day one, particularly when late in the morning the sun was out, it was a beautiful day and there were hopes the worst might be over the Waihopai burst its banks and Collingwood, Waikiwi and Grasmere went under. "We just worked and worked and worked," Mr Jones recalled.

"We'd come in to the office, develop our prints and then go out again." The arrival of air force helicopters and army trucks helped with transport, but a frustration of the first day's coverage was that staff couldn't get much beyond Invercargill jammed in by flood waters.

Mr Jones still has images in his mind: "At times the air was filled with the thud of choppers and the streets north of the city with khaki army vehicles filled with people."

And everywhere he looked there was water "brown, horrid and deep."

Floods are not short-lived disasters. They are not quickly over. Water will eventually recede but, as we all learned, that can lead to more trauma as people are allowed back to their homes, in many cases to discover a lifetime's cherished moments in the form of photographs and other intensely personal items had been lost or had to be thrown away.

They made compelling, heart-rending stories scores if not hundreds of them.

As Mr Jones said: "It was ongoing, ongoing, ongoing. But we got pretty good at it."

There were humorous times. On one occasion, Mr Jones watched as an expensive but flood-damaged settee was passed from one neighbour to the next for an insurance assessment. It had been the best sofa on the street.

And people cared about others, even when they mightn't have felt so inclined. Michele Poole had been randomly interviewing people who had just been allowed back into their homes. She was driving a Southland Times car bearing the newspaper's sign on its doors. When she returned to the car, it had a flat tyre. "Bugger," she thought, and set about changing it. To her surprise, people left their flood repairs and cleaning up to help her, a person who effectively was just a nuisance.

"Never a Day Like It," the lead heading understated on the morning of Saturday, January 28. Twenty-five years later, the black-and-white newspaper looks antiquated, and by today's standards, the reproduction of photographs is poor, the layout basic.

But pictures and stories captured the drama of the day as subsequent papers would record the aftermath.

There was relief that nobody had drowned, a horse was washed backwards through a culvert and survived, Invercargill Airport was about to go under again, there were mass evacuations in Tuatapere and Otautau, and three weddings had to be postponed. Among other things.

But most relieved appeared to be the Meteorological Service, an anonymous spokesman saying: "We were forecasting this about Tuesday. It's not much consolation to Southlanders but, at least, it's one we got right."

No journalist who covered the 1984 floods could forget them. Several like Chris Destrieux were directly affected. But stories were everywhere. Overtime wasn't an issue. You could sense the history of the occasion, and, as numerous others commented, disaster brings out the best in people.

As Ms Poole said: "As an event to be part of, it was a real career-maker for me."

She now works for Environment Southland, which took over the responsibilities of the catchment board. If another flood arrived tomorrow, she'd still be in the thick of it.

"I think I'm an emergency junkie because of the 84 floods."

On the day, however, we did overlook one aspect. The paper of Saturday, January 28, 1984, a mere 20c was something to be proud of, that first draft of history for everyone to keep.

The Southland Times printed its normal run.

Shops were quickly emptied. If only we'd kept the press running.

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