put in heroic shift during peninsula floods

Crews

Devonport Volunteer Fire Brigade crews battled throughout the night to help floodstruck peninsula residents, some of its 18 volunteers putting in round-the-clock stints.

As well as dealing with call-outs locally, they were diverted north at the height of the floods on Friday 27 January to help professional crews in Wairau Valley, Takapuna, Glenfield, and Mairangi Bay.

On Wednesday, when heavy rains returned, they were out from 5.10am, attending calls to Calliope Rd, Queens Pde and others.

They also attended a death which was referred to the Coroner.

Calls were most commonly to flooded basements and lower levels of homes. “We ended up pumping out water as much as possible and then squeegeeing,” said the brigade’s principal officer in charge, Warren Tucker.

Even homes well set up to deal with flooding wiht their own submersibe pumps in basements struggled due to the ferocity of the downpours.

“People have done the right things, it was purely the volume,” said Tucker.“One place had two pumps and they couldn’t handle it.”

Tucker said garages were also the scene of a lot of flooding. “If water flows through the garage, it can often flow on to the living areas.”

Tucker was away for the long weekend, so missed the Friday deluge, returning to minor flooding at his own Bayswater home, only to see worse on duty on Wednesday.

Two other volunteers suffered significant flooding at their homes in Bayswater.

Senior volunteer Dan Brady, who worked both Friday and Wednesday, said the rain on Wednesday seemed even more intense, though did not last as long. “The destruction was more intense, because it was so sodden.”

Deputy fire chief Mark Edwards and Brady worked on Friday, from 3.30pm until 4.30am. Other volunteers were in rotating crews, including local board member Gavin Busch.

Although the peninsula had only half a dozen call-outs on 27 January, crews were diverted to more local jobs while on the road. Around Shoal Bay Rd, Brady said:

“The volume of water running down the streets was nuts.”

Near the Navy Base, water was around 80cm deep, coinciding with the high tide. In the Stanley Bay dip, it was near half a metre deep.

In his 42 years of mostly living in Devonport, Brady says has never seen such volumes of rain and can only remember the golf course flooding as badly once before, when he was a child.

“But the other thing that was a worry on Friday was the sheer volume of slips.”

The scenes further north are those that have most stuck in his mind – including Wairau Valley left looking like a tsunami had gone through it after Wairau Creek rose six or seven metres.

Looking ahead, Brady says planning for onein -a -100-year floods may no longer be enough.