It will be a complex job drying out the old cobb cottage at Spring Grove which has watched time go by since the 1840s and has now been flooded twice in two weeks.
The high-profile cottage was home to the first World of Wearable Art show in 1987 and for the past 13 years has been home to Kathy Cambridge, who had never had any reason to expect flooding until a fortnight ago.
Now she has had two floods filling the cottage in two weeks, just like her daughter and son-in-law, Jeanette and Glen Aspin, who live further down the drive and other neighbours.
“It just happened so quickly,” she says of the first flood.
“I looked out the front door and the whole yard was full of water and coming in the house within about 20 minutes. You didn’t have time to put things up out of the water.
“It was terrifying because it was happening so fast and what do you do?”
The clean-up was underway to start the complex job of trying to dry out the cobb and stop the rising damp, when the second flood filled it again.
This time it was about 9.30 at night when the houses were flooded and Jeanette says it was a “long night mopping up water”.
They had made an insurance claim for the first flood and now they were going through another insurance claim, along with paying another excess.
Jeanette says they now have questions about why the Wai-iti River broke through the bank where it did and flooded land and houses that haven’t been flooded before, not in their memory anyway.
“We want some answers because we have to live here.”
Likewise, neighbour Rose Renton says something has changed around the river and it is a serious situation that needs to be remedied.
While the first time was a shock and scary, this time was even worse for her family, and she says they heard the water coming and it was coming fast.
“It was waves; clearly waves. It was horrific and much scarier this time because it was in the dark. The first time was dramatic, but this time it was on turbo.
“I felt safe in the house because we had upstairs and were warm, but downstairs it was half a metre up the walls inside.
“People are amazing though. I’ve got great helpers, but what do the people who don’t have help do?”
In Pigeon Valley, the floodwaters rose so fast that Karen Lindsay and Rob Neame couldn’t evacuate from their home in the latest flood which came from different directions and covered their entire 20ha property.
On Saturday, they had a team clearing debris from fences and gates which showed the force of the water that had flowed from the Wai-iti River on one side and the Pigeon Valley Stream the other.
The usually tranquil Pigeon Valley Stream had turned into a violent torrent, carving off land as it went, heading overland to deposit debris and silt on paddocks and around houses.
“The water had nowhere to go – the ground can only take so much,” Karen says.
“We couldn’t evacuate because the road was too dangerous because the water was so fast.”
She says water was flowing from the Pigeon Valley Stream about half a kilometre from their house, as well as the nearby Wai-iti River.
“We got it from every bloody corner. We’ve lost land to the stream and there’s debris on all the fences. But family and friends and neighbours have been fantastic.”
