Couple forced to sleep in tent after Cyclone Gabrielle destroys home

Eilís Ryan

The devastation wrought by Cyclone Gabrielle in New Zealand will leave the country facing a repair bill of billions of dollars.

It has been a life-changing event for hundreds of thousands of people, including Mullingar woman Debbie Stephens (née Nugent) and her husband of just five months, Corey Stephens. Their home – which Corey had completely renovated – was destroyed by flood waters.

The house needed a lot of work: “Corey spent months and months before we moved in renovating it,” says Debbie.

“On the inside, you’d think it was a brand new house. He did a great job. And he just started to do a new deck and he had just started to paint outside and it was looking a million dollars. We were just putting the finishing touches to the garden and we had just spent heaps of money planting trees and plants around the house.”

While Debbie, a Montessori teacher, lived in Australia for four years, the couple actually met in Ireland after Debbie’s return home, with the result that two years after leaving Australia, Debbie headed back to the southern hemisphere, settling in New Zealand to be with Corey.

The couple set their wedding date for September of 2022, choosing The Mountain View in Kilkenny as their venue. A year in advance of that, they obtained their bungalow home in a semi-rural part of Hawke’s Bay, a two-minute drive from the beach. Before Christmas, they were joined in New Zealand by Debbie’s mother, Miriam, who was also in the house when the cyclone struck.

New Zealanders knew the February 13 cyclone was coming and it was going to be bad: “I had heard it as it was going on all that night. We could hear the wind and the rain and we knew it was coming that night because we had been told it was coming. And we knew the worst of it was going to come overnight.”

A tree came down on the road outside their home, but when they got up on Valentine’s morning, the Stephenses were relieved that they seemed they had come through the storm unscathed, little imagining that was to change: “I had heard that the area where we used to live was really badly hit. So I messaged my friend and I said to her, ‘are you okay? I heard Eskdale was hit really bad’.

“And she said ‘no: we’re f***ed’.

“Basically she and her whole family were on top of their kitchen table and wound up stranded there for two days.

“I said ‘do the emergency services know?’ And she said ‘yeah, they know – but they can’t get to us’.

“We were fine. We were like: ‘God, we’re so lucky!’. Some people were without power, but we still had power, and…literally all that had happened was one of our deck chairs blew over.

“So the rain stops, the sun comes out. Then our power went out and I went out to the shed with Corey to get a generator and some water that we had out there because our water went off; and we went back into the house to put on the kettle and me and my mam and Corey had a cup of tea and some toast.

“We made some snacks like just, you know, cheese and crackers or something, and we sat down eating it. And we were getting all these Civil Defence alerts – something they do here in cases of earthquakes and tidal waves and stuff, they send an alert to your phone.

“The alerts were to say certain areas were being told to evacuate, but our area wasn’t coming up.

“Then somewhere close to us came up and we thought maybe we should evacuate.

“Corey went out to have a look and he could see water in the distance and he thought ‘that doesn’t really look good’. And then all of a sudden, it started to come in – from either side of the property. And he was like: ‘We need to go – now!’.”

In New Zealand, because of the threat from earthquakes, houses tend to have an evacuation pack ready, so Debbie grabbed theirs, together with some dog food and the leads for the couple’s two Chihuahuas but not much else, because already the water was rising rapidly.

“Corey was outside saying ‘we need to go now’; Mam was packing some things and came from her room and I think she was about to put on some gum boots, but Corey just grabbed her and picked her up and carried her to the car. It was already up to her knees at that stage.”

When they escaped, the three went to the home of Corey’s parents. They had enough room inside to accommodate Mrs Nugent, who has since moved on to relatives in Auckland. Debbie and Corey initially had to sleep in a tent in the garden.

“So that night, I was thinking: ‘No, no, it’s going to be okay: surely the water won’t go into the house, the house is pretty high’. And I was just hoping and praying that it didn’t go into the house – but at the same time, in my mind’s eye, all I could see was the whole house covered in water and things floating around. So I was just hoping for the best and hoping it would be okay.”

The next day, the couple were anxious to return to their home to check on things: “We tried to get down there and it was fairly obvious by how far the water was up on the road – and you couldn’t get down to the house – that it wasn’t going to be good,” says Debbie.

Driving through the floodwaters was out of the question: “We managed to get hold of a kayak and then Corey and his brother went in by kayak and came back with the bad news that the whole place was just destroyed,” says Debbie.

Later, Debbie and her mother made the same journey, anxious to retrieve important items – including her mother’s treasured wedding ring.

The next day they were able to drive back to their home but shockingly, in the interim, the house had fallen victim to looters – something that Debbie has come to realise happens quite commonly in New Zealand: “A lot of that happens here it’s pretty standard as soon as power is out and cameras are out and people aren’t in their homes,” she explains.

A few days later, a new problem arose: “We were just gutting everything out of the house and then we were evacuated again. We were halfway through ripping the carpet up and we were told the sewage plant nearby was leaking and that we needed to get out of there. Of course it’s not healthy to be there because of all that floodwater mixed with sewage.

“The place just stinks to the high heavens. It’s completely contaminated.”

As well as that, there was a dead pig and a dead sheep floating in the garden.

As the days go on, Debbie and Corey are trying to figure out what they have lost. In the rush to evacuate, for example, Debbie’s car was left in the shed at the property – and it was destroyed. As well as the furniture, also destroyed were all of Corey’s power tools and countless other items.

The devastation is immense: enormous numbers of bridges have been washed away; residents of the affected area are cut off from Auckland, normally a five-hour drive away. It is extremely difficult to get flights, so Debbie was relieved when she was able to secure her mother a seat on a flight to Auckland, from where she hopes to fly back to Ireland.

All sorts of heart-breaking stories of tragedies are emerging in the aftermath of the flooding. Some houses were flooded not just by water but by silt, and there are rumours of deaths in cars submerged in silt.

An assessor has been out to view the damage at Debbie and Corey’s house, but it has emerged they were under-insured: “If we get paid out from insurance, it’s not going to cover anywhere near what we’ve lost.”

It is a serious financial hit coming just five months after the expense of their wedding at The Mountain View in Kilkenny. At least the car insurers are going to replace her car – but a worry now for motorists is whether there will be cars available to buy.

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