Renwick losses counted

Press, 12 July 1983, Page 1

Renwick losses counted

By LES BLOXHAM Mops, shovels, brooms, and hoses were wielded willingly yesterday by scores of volunteers to clear mud and silt from flooddamaged homes at Renwick.

Mopping up began as soon as the rampaging waters of the Wairau receded. About 14 homes on a low terrace on the river side of the town were inundated, in some instances by water more than a metre deep.

So thick was the silt in some places that hoses had to be used to blast it away. In others, gumbooted helpers squelched over carpets once rich with pile. Away from the town centre farmers counted their losses — 200 Corriedales here; another 100 or so there. Fences, at least those that had survived the

battering force of the river, were a tangle of debris and carcases.

Along Conders Bend Road, ewes that on Saturday had been carrying next season’s lambs were yesterday being cut up for dog tucker. It was the area round Conders Road that took the first blast of the Wairau River's fury. Mr lan Jordan, the Renwick area’s Civil Defence warden, took a photographer, David Alexander and me to the gaping hole where the river had burst through supposedly protective groynes. Not only had the river gouged through once-lush pastures, but it left acres of gravel and boulders in its wake.

Mr Jordan estimated that about 10 per cent of the river’s flood-swollen flow had broken free. He re-

called visiting the area with his deputy warden, Mr Pat Hammond, soon after 4 a.m. on Sunday. “We were carried along Conders Bend Road by a wall of surging water 6ft high,” he said. “It was frightening.”

Mr Jordan and Mr Hammond opened the Renwick Primary School and immediately warned residents of homes in the lower lying areas of the imminent danger. By dawn on Sunday 28 homes had been evacuated.

"Our biggest problem was waking people up,” said Mr Jordan. “Some just didn’t hear the phone and we had to go and thump on their walls.”

One elderly woman was rescued in style. Mrs A. Nees, aged 88, was carried in a chair by volunteers through waist-deep water to the back of a Forestry

truck. Yesterday, as she was resting in a Blenheim hospital, a group of young helpers was busy clearing her home of silt and debris. Evidence of the water’s force will remain for days. For instance, it tore a section of seal 8m square by 4cm thick from the main highway near Renwick and dumped it in one piece, like a scrap of paper, on the grass verge. Further along the road hundreds of apples littered a bedraggled vineyard — they were from an orchard half a kilometre away.

Nearby, equally bedraggled animals huddled in the one secure paddock of the Marlborough Zoological Park. It was an ark-like mix — kangaroos, sheep, wallabies, antelope, and chamois all sharing a rare, dry quarter-acre refuge.