As Tasman moves into summer, an effort is being made to ensure that the memories of its catastrophic winter aren’t lost to time.
It’s been five months since the district was hammered by two severe storms which caused some of its largest floods in almost 150 years and wreaked havoc on rural communities.
Katie Sellars, flood recovery navigator at Tasman District Council, is now working to compile stories of those wet weeks to turn into a book.
“I just know it’s important to preserve these stories for future generations,” she says.
Residents are being offered the opportunity to fill out a survey about their experiences, what they found helpful afterwards, and their aspirations for their communities as they recover.
But taking the time to write out their stories could bring benefits for flood-affected residents, other than just historical documentation.
“Recording their stories or telling their stories in some form can be very good in a sort of psychosocial sense. It can help people,” Katie says.
She and the other navigators have helped connect around 150 people and families with agencies and organisations that can help them.
Often, people were dealing with shock while others could have developed traumatic response to the wind or rain after living through the storms.
“There are people who’ve been on the land for many years and had everything they’ve built up and worked for over the last few decades just wiped out. That sort of thing is extremely difficult to deal with,” Katie says.
“There are a lot of people who have a few years ahead of them of recovery and that’s pretty disheartening, it’s pretty hard to go through.”
Once one of three Government-funded navigators, Katie is now the only one still active in the role and still receives calls from people when they have queries, and is often out in affected communities.
But her focus was now on compiling the book and was hoping to get a few more submissions.
“Everyone thinks it’s a great idea but very few are coming forward, and it would be really good to because I think it’s a valuable thing,” she says.
“If you think about your children and your grandchildren asking questions about it, it would be great just to have a few things written down and recorded, and they don’t have to be big or dramatic.”
For example, some people have given accounts reflected on how quickly the water rose around them.
“Even little things like that, just to give an idea… of what it was like.”
The survey, which can be found on the Tasman District Council website, is open until Sunday 7 December and asked just seven questions.
Submitters can write as much or as little as they’d like.
“It’s for people to have something where they can look at it and say, ‘Actually, yeah, we went through all of this and look what came out of it, and now we’re moving forward’,” Sellars said.
The book project received $13,000 from the National Public Health Service’s Nelson Marlborough health promotion budget.
A Health New Zealand spokesperson said it was a “good mental well-being activity to support recovery”.
“Many people want something physical to hold onto after an event swirls through their lives. It also shows that their words are not transient, and it gives some kind of external embodiment or permanence to their own experience.”
The funding was for assistance in preparing, producing, or printing the book, which was intended to have enough copies to be provided to people affected by the floods and made available in local libraries.
