ESK VALLEY STILL A WILDERNESS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21184, 3 November 1938, Page 4

ESK VALLEY STILL A WILDERNESS

Ruin and Desolation Scene Six Months After Flood While the rest of Hawkes Bay is green with spring vegetation, the siltcovered Esk Valley remains a wilderness of sun-baked mud, flood debris and brown, dead trees. Although six months have elapsed since the flood disaster, the once fertile valley still presents a scene of ruin and desolation. Motorists passing through the valley from Napier begin to observe traces of flood damage about a mile beyond Petane, where the hillsides can be seen scarred with slips to an unbelievable extent. Whole hillsides appear t* be crumbling or sliding away. The new grass has not grown on the bare clay guts whence the surface soil has been scoured, to add to the silt covering the Iley floor. At the entrance to the valley, where the silt appears of a slightly richer consistency, a fair growth of grass has been obtained, and oat or wheat crops have struck root in a sparse and patchy way. At first, the passer-by notices only by the buried fence-posts and the piled debris against the tree-trunks how serious the havoc has been.

Approaching Esk village. however, the road becomes a clay track traversing a desert of silt. The deposit appears sandy, loose and sterile. Its depth can be gauged by the appearance of half-buried objects projecting forlornly. Right by the Maori War memorial in Esk, a concrete house stands, intact and sound, but set in a deep pit dug through the four-foot mire. That house will never be of use again; too solidly built to jack up or lift on top of the mud. as has been done with wooden buildings, it will remain a silent witness to the altered level of the valley floor. Buried Houses Other houses have been shifted, but there are still one or two that either remain partially buried, their windows peeping over the bare flats, or have been dug out and sit entrenched, walled around with the piles of mud dug from around and within them. Huge piles of logs, willow-roots and debris are stacked high against the standing trees. The bulk and situation of these heaps of flotsam and jetsam tell how high and fierce must have been the tide of the floods that swept the valley at the time of the disaster. Farther down the valley, the broken bridge of the main road stands ruined, practically the entire bridge with its pylons and supports having been washed clean away to sea, leaving only the approaches. At one end a railway signal-box stands at the riverside, some miles from its original site and half a mile from the nearest point of the railway line. While the willows and poplars do not appear to have suffered in the least from the wetting, the effect of the changed soil level on other trees has been in many cases fatal. Brown and withered macrocarpas, larches and pines stand guard over the ruined homesteads with their buried gardens. Even hardy eucalyptus have suffered in some places. Orchard trees have been saved by digging them about the roots. Repairing the Damage The work of rehabilitation is everywhere in evidence. Temporary roads, wooden bridges, bull-dozers and tractors, pumping stations, and deep drains driven across the valley, new fences, house: jacked up or actually in transit, or set on new foundations above the silt, show what a tremendous amount has and is being done. But the bare earth, with only a few straggling blades of green peeping from the furrows of the drilled fields, shows what yet remains to be done. Perhaps the largest undertakings of all has been the refencing of the valley. Practically every fence has had to be renewed—and at the feet of the new posts the heads of the old ones just show here and there out of the mire. Many score of miles of fencing must hav? been erected since the floods, at a costs of up to £2OO a mile.