Kia ora,
My name's Storm Harrison, I’m a Corporal
in the New Zealand Army.
I come from
Napier Hawke's Bay, so Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Porou
And my mother side is Ngāti Raukawa.
On the Monday before the floods hit Eskdale and Whirinaki.
I just knocked off work.
Probably about 1300, got home.
Everyone got put on call.
No one knew that anything was going to eventuate because everyone
thought Auckland will get hit and it will disappear.
1:00 in the morning or quarter to one.
I had Staff Sergeant Forbes rung me,
bro, get to the
Bayview Fire Station ASAP. You need to get down here,
grab what gear you’ve got.
The banks have burst.
I headed down to the fire station in Bayview and
yeah, she was pretty chaotic down there.
The power had gone out, so it was dark.
They had lights going and
Staff Sergeant Forbes turned up on a Unimog,
and he just said, we’ve got all our gear in here bro.
We're going to bounce out there and start saving people.
We told the firies, we've got to go.
We've got to go. There’s people out there,
you know, screaming for help because they could hear them from
the roofs. Had two police officers jump in with me in the mog and a firie.
We shot down to the Napier - Taupō turnoff,
and you could see the river flowing pretty fast and hard
and I saw the house at the corner, just the tip of the roof
from the headlights and the high beam on of the truck.
So we thought, okay, we'll enter the water here.
As soon as we entered the water,
the headlights went out, we couldn't see nothing.
So I quickly backed out and then we had a quick
look at the gauge, the depth gauge of the river.
And yea, she was pretty deep.
It was pretty deep.
So we shot down to Eskdale Primary School.
On the way there.
We picked up one of the boys, Ricky Key,
who had a chainsaw because we have trees down and he
cut his way through in his bare feet,
chopping through the trees to get us through.
And Eskdale primary school, the water was up to the school
rugby field and we were just blown away because you could hear it,
it was loud and
in the distance, like as soon as we got up to the edge of the water.
You could see big, huge tanks and containers,
well what looked like containers,
at night, just floating past.
We could hear people out there yelling out for help, you know.
So that's something you'll never forget, in the dark. And then
we were like, oh, bugger it.
We’ll just head across.
We had two big LED spotlights.
So one police officer jumped on the roof,
Staff Forbes jumped on the roof, I turned the lights off,
so we wouldn't do any damage to the electrics.
Not that it mattered at the time.
Had the lights on, facing into the water
and you could see the current was just going hard.
And then we're like, holy!
You know, like, this is bad.
We drive into the water and yea,
good old Unimog got us so far and then we just couldn't keep going
because the truck would of disappeared too.
So bear in mind, there's still people that were clinging to life
just yelling out for help.
And you felt helpless because you were trying to do
as much as you could.
Unfortunately, we had to pull back and then just yell out
to people in the dark.
Just hang on.
Just wait, we’re here. We can hear you.
And then,
you know,
it felt like hours man.
Couldn't do nothing.
The Surf Life Rescue boys turned up on their boats
and civilians turn up on jet boats, and they were racing around too
trying to save people and
I looked out in the distance and I could see that,
you know, the light was coming up and I could see the sign
at the end of the road, the yellow sign with the arrows, black arrows.
And I thought, yep, the Mog can get through there.
so we just jumped straight in the Mog.
Hammered down through the silt, through the current, the rapid.
And then, got to the end and started
rescuing people that were there.
First house we come to
was a lady and her two kids. There was a young boy
and a girl and they had been up there since midnight
and so they'd been sitting up there for a long time
and she just
said, thanks for coming, you know, like she did say, I thought it was over.
We were over.
And she just had her two kids
from 12:00 at night to nearly 10:00 the next day.
It's going to be okay. It's going to be okay.
And they were they were actually the people we could hear over the roar.
So you just imagine that river roaring, just like a freight train.
But you can still hear people screaming at the same time, yelling for help.
I think that's,
you know, for her to have the courage
to keep her kids calm
was the big thing.
Because once I grabbed those two kids,
all they wanted to do was go for a ride on the Army truck.
So I think their mind at the time, they didn't realize
how much danger they were in, you know.
But yeah, and I think that sort of gave you
a good feeling too, is like, yeah that's mean.
You know like we’ll keep pumping forward, you know, I can’t get tired.
Even though I was knackered.
Just next house, next house.
So yeah.
By the time
I got to the end of the Taupō turnoff,
friends, like, my friend's mum and dad needed help.
So we, we dismounted the Unimog and
ran up thinking like sand, look like sand, you know, normal hard sand.
But I was and up to the ankles so we were like sludging through,
and then got to near the end of the driveway
and for me and myself I thought, oh yea, just run through this area.
And man, I sunk to my waist and I was trying to like, lift myself out.
I was just getting sucked in.
I had a life jacket on and had my helmet with me just to just
in case we had to enter some buildings, but I couldn't even move.
That's how how thick the silt was.
And the mud was just pulling you down, right down.
I felt my knee really to pull.
The only way I
could get out was just lay flat and then just, like,
lay on my stomach and then just sort of, like, crawl like a
like an ant or something just to get to them.
And like, I was blowing.
I was tired, I was knackered.
And then when I got to the the lady she goes to me.
Are you okay?
I said nah, we're not going that way, you know, like it was that hard out.
And so we took our breath, we took a breath and managed to find another route.
So we managed to get them out.
Saved her, her rabbits and other personal items.
And then after that, that's when the hard tasks
started.
The rest of the five seven boys started to turn up, so
they jumped in the Mog and then took the people we saved away.
And there was me, a private and
two firefighters.
And then
yea, we start a clearing houses. So
from then on, that's when it was tough
because you didn't know what you're going to find.
We just didn't know if we were going to find
people or children or anything like that.
So that was the probably the worst part was knowing
what was behind the door.
you know, the water came down pretty quick,
but then you could see the aftermath, what it had done.
A lot of it was silt.
But I describe it as like a tidal
wave had come through or a tsunami.
It just wiped everything out.
And I had a
police radio and firie radio, and
they just said to me, Can you clear 101?
And I was like, we can’t mate,
There's nothing there, the house had absolutely being destroyed.
All that was left was
the floor.
Down about 100 meters
was the roof in the tree line, the avocado trees. What was left
was the dishwasher was sitting up high in the trees.
So that gave you an insight of how powerful the water was.
The silt itself it was like,
far, where did it come from, you know, like it was so, so high.
So one of the houses was you could just walk from the ground onto the roof.
That's how high the silt was.
And we were lucky.
We had a breaching cap,
so we grabbed the bars out and started smashing through the roof
of the house, just to peel it open to yell out if anyone was there.
But, if there were people there you wouldn’t know
because the silt was that high.
So you just had to do what you could,
with what resources you had and just go to the next house.
Because the main priority then was searching for people
and it was a long day, long, long day doing that.
But you know, this is in your town, this is in your home.
These are people, you know,
So that kept us motivated,
just searching for life.
It's not just me.
There was heaps of us doing what anyone would do to help others.
You know, you don't think about you.
You don't really think about yourself.
At the time.
You know, you just think about, they need help.
You know, we've got to get in there and get the job done.
And I think
that's just the soldiers mindset.
I suppose, you know, or not
just the soldiers mindset, anyone that, that's there to help.
You know, like me, I didn't really think about my own safety at first.
And, you know, even later, you know, I'd probably do the same again
just to jump in there and help anyone, you know, like
you hear of,
later that day.
It was a little girl that went missing.
And, you know, you think of
your own tamariki.
So,
Yeah, I just yeah, it was it was a long, hard day, that day.
But I think when you heard about a little girl, that was hard
because as a father, you know, you just want to die yourself,
Yeah, but for us,
when you think of it, you know, that makes me
I'll do it again to save to save as many people as I could.
And obviously we couldn't.
Not everyone was saved.
You know, there was a few people that passed.
But, you know, I'm just I'm happy that I was there
that day and and hopefully made a difference to save people.