![]() But there are likely to be fatalities beyond the homes, out in the valleys, caught in the piles of logs or buried under silt. “Because we know people climbed up there,” Cooper says. So far, teams have focused their search on houses – checking the attics and roof cavities. Members of Urban search and rescue check a vehicle embedded in the wall of a house in Esk. By the side of the state highway, the Urban search and rescue team leader, Ken Cooper, has stopped to check on some colleagues. The fatalitiesĪs the week has drawn on, the task of firefighters and search and rescue teams has turned increasingly grim – transitioning from rooftop rescues to the recovery of bodies. ![]() I thought my brother was dead for sure – I couldn’t see him on the roof.” His brother and his family were ultimately rescued from the roof cavity of their home – trapped inside after breaking his way through the ceiling using a wooden Thomas the Tank Engine set. I thought the house was going to smash up,” he says. “The noise of the logs smashing the house. And just the fear of it all.” James spent Monday night huddled on the roof with his family after the waters rose to the ceiling of their home. You had the darkness and the rain and the noise of the water. “The noise is what really got me – the noise of it,” says Philip James, standing next to what remains of his house. Philip James, picture with his wife, Sarah Johnson, says: ‘The noise is what really got me – the noise of it.’ Photograph: Kerry Marshall/The Guardian “To have gone through this, when we could’ve been staying at Grandma’s.” At that point, the family were already climbing through their kitchen window as the waters rose over their kitchen table. An evacuation order – sent to every mobile phone in the area – came through at 5.24am. But mixed with their relief is fury at the lack of evacuation warnings or emergency alerts. He swam out to help and eventually bundled her up in a makeshift nest of greenhouse netting and plastic until a rescue boat arrived. When dawn finally came, he spotted her arms gripping the metal-frame roof of an industrial greenhouse. “I remember thinking, at least that means she’s not dead,” he says. Sitting through the night, he heard the same woman as Kelly McKendry, screaming in the distance. Their neighbour, Max Robertson, spent the night with them on the roof after evacuating his father and dogs atop a floating picnic table. Photograph: Kerry Marshall/The GuardianĮventually, the family and those near them were rescued. Max Robertson remembers a woman screaming and thinking ‘at least it means she’s not dead’. He had been swept down from a caravan park more than a kilometre up the road. It marks where a man being swept past in the flood had grabbed on – the corner of the McKendrys’ roof the first thing he had managed to keep hold of. “See there, that dent?” Michael says, pointing to where the guttering of the house has bent downwards. “I realised we couldn’t swim to safety,” she says. As the water reached her shoulders, she realised she was beginning to drift in the current. Kelly remembers trying to wade across the yard to a neighbour’s two-storey home. When the family woke in the early hours of the morning, the water was already calf-deep. The McKendrys pluck their daughter’s violin from the sludge, and slowly clear the mud from between the strings. On Friday, a few residents returned with spades and trowels, to dig any belongings from the debris. One house has been carried almost a kilometre from its foundations, logs impaled through walls shredded like damp cardboard. The railway line running through the valley has buckled in on itself, twisted into looping ribbons. Motorhomes and caravans lie tossed across the landscape, windscreens smashed, metalwork caved in, some upside down and stacked on top of one another, others submerged to their roofs in the mud. Orchard vines are stripped from the wires, cornfields are flattened, and everything is coated in a metres-thick layer of iron-grey sludge. “As we went out our kitchen window, we heard a woman go past in the water screaming.”Īlmost a week after Cyclone Gabrielle hit New Zealand, the couple have returned to find the green valley where they made their home a moonscape. “I couldn’t feel anything, I was just doing,” says Kelly. A few feet below, the flood moved in a seething brown mass, roiling under the gutters. C rouched in the dark, gripping the slick corrugated iron, Michael and Kelly McKendry hauled themselves and their daughter on to their rooftop.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |