Flooding at Matakana Village

Posted: February 9, 2011

If you look around the Matakana Village now, its hard to believe that 10 days ago it was ankle deep in mud and silt from the river, and at the rivers peak around 1am, the ground floor shops were under a foot of water.

We experienced two tropical cyclones within a week. In the first, the river rose quite significantly as you can see below, and no one expected it would ever reach above that level.

When the second cyclone came, it was combination of an already high river, saturated ground, rapid rainfall in a very short space of time, and falling trees, bamboo and debris which are believed to have blocked the river and then caused a surge of water into the Market Square, and the shops and carparks. The power of the surge pushed logs into the carpark, moved the tables in the market, snapped trees and bamboo, and moved plinths in Piece Gallery that take 3 men to move. You can see the difference in the picture above from the first cyclone, and the picture below from when the river receded after the second cyclone.

Market Stall holders arrived Saturday morning to find carparks full of mud and silt, and the Farmers’ Market space completely unuseable. But within hours the entire village was full of hundreds of people from the community, volunteering their time to help out shop owners who had shops full of water and mud, damaged stock, carpets and shop fittings. People arrived with brooms and buckets in hand and without even asking, got stuck in to help the cleanup. By 4pm it was hard to tell anything had happened at all.

On Behalf of all Matakana Village Business we wish to extend a huge thank you to those that put in so much effort to help out on a day we never thought would come. Without the generous help of these people in the community and beyond, the cleanup would have been a lot more arduous.

Below is the Letter to the Editor by Landlord Richard Didsbury posted 3rd of February with a picture taken outside of Heavenly Soles in the rising floodwaters.