Firefighter’s frantic rescue efforts as river roared

When the raging Waipawa River threatened to breach stopbanks, mechanic and Waipukurau volunteer firefighter Shontae Ellmers was frantically banging on doors warning locals to evacuate.

“You could hear the water slapping against the stopbank before it spilled over, it was really crashing and really rough. You would have thought you were at the beach and when the water breached over you could hear it coming; it was a roar, it was unreal,” Shontae says.

Shontae works at MTA member Mike Jane’s Auto Super Shoppes Waipawa, and when the call went out to back up the local brigade during the storm, Shontae was there to help.

Initially she thought all would be fine and the river would hold back, but as the storm continued through the morning and the river level rose, the community’s fears of flooding were realised.

“We went to help Waipawa Volunteer Fire Brigade evacuate, it is not a big town, but the number of people they were trying to get to was quite large compared to the numbers we were helping in Waipuk,” she says.

“We were going around and knocking on doors and letting people know they needed to get out, and quite a few people didn’t know what was going on and were a bit frightened.”

The whole time, the river was thrashing at the stopbanks. Once it breached, efforts were even more frantic as the water level rose a metre in 10 minutes, she says.

“We were down there when it breached and were still getting people out driving through the water in our vehicles; it came up very, very quickly.

“We just had to calm them down and tell them, if they had family they needed to go, take what they needed and go.

“It was hectic and luckily the flooding happened during the daytime, because if it was at nighttime it would have been a different story, especially with the young families in some of the houses.”

On the other hand, he’s been busy with urgent repairs since the cyclone.

“A customer came in because his Plymouth had water up over the roof and it has a new motor in it. They want the motor pulled out and stripped down before it’s too late. Another customer has a race car that was flooded and they can’t afford to let them lie.”

He has managed to get the office and Eftpos up and running using a Starlink device to connect to the internet.

Starlink is the world’s first and largest satellite constellation using a low Earth orbit to deliver broadband internet capable of supporting streaming, online gaming, and video calls and delivering high-speed, low-latency internet to users all over the world.

“I got on to the idea of Starlink from friends who manually got in contact because I had no phone. They had drowned their truck and we cleaned the fuel tank out so they could go and check on his stock and he offered the use of his internet connection and that’s when I found out about using Starlink,” Jason says.

“That was him repaying the favour to me cleaning his tank out and I decided we needed one.”

Jason hopes life – and business - will soon return to normal.

Mike Jane would have been keen to help out also. He’s in the Waipawa Brigade, but he was laid up in bed with a severe bug and by the time he saw daylight the worst of the flood was over. His home and business got through the event unscathed, and he says although he’s grateful he does feel guilty about it when there are so many in the community who have lost a lot.

“It is hard to talk to people when they have been affected and you haven’t,” Mike says.

“But in saying that the community is bouncing back and the mood is pretty upbeat.”

Mike says it is back to business as usual, but getting freight to the town has become a challenge.

“If it is coming from Auckland it has to go all the way to Palmy and come up to us from there, so the old thing of telling the customer it will be overnight now - it could be two days or three days, so it is blowing things out a bit.”