Fracture

In the night of February 13th, 2023, a fracture occurred, though we did not know it yet.

Bands of rain from Cyclone Gabrielle had lashed our shores for more than 24 hours at that point, but over the course of that Monday, the deluge had intensified and grown more persistent. Schools had initially tried to open that morning, but eventually bowed to the reality of the escalating storm. I had tried to get a little work done, then left work early to ensure our preparations at home were finished. We had 3 large jugs of water and every water bottle in the house filled, a well-stocked pantry, flashlights located, and devices fully charged. We hadn't had time to buy an emergency radio, but hoped we wouldn't need it.

In the afternoon, I had walked out with O into the whipping rain to check on the state of the ocean and Wainui Stream. He wore his prescription goggles instead of glasses, which turned out to be quite clever as the rain pelted our faces and our rain jackets whipped around our bodies. We could barely hear each other over the howl of the wind and the roar of the surf, which didn't look impressive until we realized that the waves were so large they were breaking well beyond the shore, then foaming and re-breaking their way in to the beach. The ocean was like a latte, with frothy foam over cafe au lait waters. We worried what the ocean might do when the tide peaked that night.

Back at home, we focused our dinner on food that might not keep if we lost power and then settled in for a movie night, grateful the electricity could still enable it. We watched Into the Woods, the theatrical version with Bernadette Peters starring as the rapping witch. As Jack and the Baker and his wife fretted over the crashing giant come down from the beanstalk, we listened to the rain pounding on the windows, uncertain what this goliath of a storm might bring. At one point, E and I looked at each other and mouthed "what was that?" We had both felt the earth rock beneath us like a subway train going around a bend. When we checked later we realized there had been a 4.4 magnitude earthquake just inland from us, in an odd convergence of natural forces. Where else but New Zealand do you get an earthquake in the middle of a cyclone?

Map showing the location of the earthquake the night the cyclone came through

At the end of the first act, we put the kids to bed, though they were unsettled. N didn't think she would be able to sleep. I walked around the house, checking on the collection of pots we had positioned under the drips coming from the ceiling. Some were filling rapidly enough that they might need emptying before the night was done. In the dining room, we found the table soaked by some new leaks, so we pulled out our mixing bowls and arrayed them under the dripping beam. I wasn't sure how much sleep I would manage either.

I woke to the sound of an emergency alert from our phones. River levels were rising rapidly and people were encouraged to evacuate from low-lying areas around the rivers. Though we are situated up a slope from both the shore and Wainui Stream, I did begin to wonder if we were high enough.

Later, I woke again to find the power had gone out. I checked for any updates from Civil Defence, but we no longer had any cell service either. I wandered the house, checking on leaks and peering into the rainy night, but I could discern no difference from earlier. The rain still lashed the windows, the wind still tossed the trees about, but I couldn't see any change. With no power and no communication, we were in the dark, both literally and figuratively. I went back to bed, hoping we were high enough above the rising waters.

In the morning, I circled the house inside and out, grateful to find no signs of damage other than the leaks we had already identified. Still no power, no internet, no cell service. Out at the street, I didn't see any power lines or trees down, and there even a few cars on the road, crossing the small bridge over Wainui Stream without difficulty. The scene was surprisingly mundane.

Though we had plenty of water stored in our rainwater tanks, it wasn't running as the pump requires electricity to operate. I was glad we had stored so much, but immediately wondered if it would be enough. How long would the power be out?

Hoping our food might keep longer, we didn't open the fridge and focused on pantry items for breakfast. Oatmeal and instant coffee were made by boiling water on our gas stove, lit with a barbecue lighter. We washed up campground style, with a bucket of water from our rain barrel we use to water the garden. The buckets and mixing bowls filled by leaks were useful for toilet flushing.

After breakfast, we all pulled on our rain gear and headed out for a broader survey of the neighborhood. Down at the mouth of Wainui Stream, piles of debris left a clear high water mark all the way at the top of the beach access ramp and along the steep banks, showing just how close the water had come to inundating many neighboring homes. Amazingly, we saw very little damage and the beachfront homes seemed to have come through the storm without trouble. Soon, another band of heavy rain swept across the land and began to pummel us, so we headed for home.

Debris at the high water mark at the end of our path to the beach. Our neighbor’s house is just behind me.

With no power and no communication with the outside world, we settled in for a day of reading, board games, and jigsaw puzzles. Our phones and devices sat useless in the charging corner.

Every once in a while, my hand would reflexively dart for my pocket, searching for my phone in a moment of inattention. But as the day went on, these moments became less frequent. I settled into the pace of a life disconnected.

At 4:35 pm we were surprised to see the power come back on, less than 24 hours after it went out. Given our remote location I figured it might have been days before it was reconnected. We gratefully used the oven to cook some dinner and ran the dishwasher. The biggest change, though, was the resumption of running water. We carefully refilled our jugs of drinking water, mindful that the power could go out again as trailing bands of the cyclone passed through. As always, the absence of this fundamental utility heightened our appreciation for all the days where it functions without a thought.

We reset our modem a few times, but the internet remained out, as did cell service. We were still disconnected, uncertain of the state of the world beyond our little neighborhood. I wondered how my colleagues were faring at the hospital. Was there damage to the buildings? Did they have enough staff, or were people unable to make it in? Were communications down at the hospital as well?

After dinner, I decided to go in and see for myself. I wasn't scheduled for any clinical duties, but figured they might need help and I hoped to learn something of the outside world.

The roads were nearly empty. I stopped at the bridge over the Waimata River and watched the churning brown water flow by. Looking around, I began to understand how high the floodwaters had reached, as there was debris left behind not just over the banks and across the riverside path, but well up the grassy slopes on either side of the river. A tangle of logs and branches pressed against the upstream side of the bridge. Across the river stood The Globe, a well-loved restaurant in town with a lovely patio along the river. The embankment there was washed out and one of the trees that lined that patio leaned out over the river like a giant, evergreen flagpole.

Debris along the banks of the still-swollen river

Forestry slash accumulated on the upstream side of the bridge. At this point, it had already been cleared at least once, with much greater amounts in the initial flooding.

Still, the bridge was open and I didn't see any signs of the mass devastation I had feared. I arrived without event at the hospital.

Walking in, I ran into one of the pediatricians who was leaving. He said things had seemed ok at the hospital throughout the day, with the generators working fine until the power was restored. However, no phone service there either, and no internet. They were cut off as well. He said there were a couple of satellite phones available for calling our transfer center if we needed assistance with any complex cases, though I wasn't sure if any flights would be able to get through.

I wandered through the medical wards, where things seemed surprisingly routine and the nurses calmly went about their tasks. The medical registrar (a senior doctor in training) who was on for the evening was quietly reading a book waiting for the next page to summon her to admit a new patient or reassess one who was already admitted.

I returned home with a little more information and reassurance that the hospital was doing fine, but still so many unanswered questions. What was happening with schools? How long would communication systems be down? The city of Gisborne seemed to have been spared the worst damage, but what about the outlying areas? Our district is mostly comprised of rural areas with vulnerable infrastructure and small, isolated communities. The only access to the rest of the East Cape is along State Highway 35, which winds along the rugged coast to our north and is often washed out by a heavy thunderstorm. The infrastructure in this remote corner is precarious at the best of times.

The next day we woke to much of the same--still no word about schools, and no way for them to inform us of their plans. So I let the kids sleep in and walked over to Wainui Beach School, the primary school that N attends, to see if I could learn anything. There was a sign outside the office saying "School Closed Today" but it didn't specify the date.

Soon other parents arrived, also seeking information. We all greeted each other with an earnest "How are you?" Fortunately, most of the answers were "Fine" or "All good". Then everyone shared updates they had.

I learned that indeed, most of Gisborne had been spared the worst but the water situation was bad--the water main from the primary water treatment plant was broken in at least 7 places and would take a long time to repair as it crossed remote, rugged terrain. The city was running on back up water supply that could only provide a third of the typical usage.

I heard multiple other communities suffered even worse damage, including up the coast from us, back toward the Waioeka Gorge, and most significantly, the Hawke's Bay area. Evidently that region was the source of our communications cut as well, as the cables carrying that information came up from Napier and might take days to weeks to repair. Multiple bridges were washed out, and all 3 roads that access our region were closed due to severe damage.

We were completely cut off, isolated from the rest of the country and the world. Like an iceberg calved from the massive glacier of humanity, we had broken from the rest of the world, and we were just beginning to understand the nature of that fracture.

I stayed at school for nearly an hour, talking with parents, some familiar, some new. No one was in a hurry, because there was nothing to get to, and we were all hungry for conversation and information and community. Eventually I walked back home on the beach, taking in the massive amounts of debris littering the sand--logs and limbs, a few hay bales, a dead lamb (this is sheep and beef farming country), and a perplexing preponderance of Roma tomatoes.

One of the hundreds of Roma tomatoes scattered on the beach after the storm

At home I shared the news I had gathered. Other parents had suggested a local radio station, More FM, that was broadcasting regular updates on the community. One of the hosts was actually sleeping at the station and accepting paper notes all day long slipped under the door that were read aloud on air. With such limited communication, this was one of the few ways to get announcements out to the community.

I headed back to the hospital. Though my outpatient clinics were all canceled for the week, I wanted to make sure they had the staff they needed. On the way I passed the head of our department out for a walk and pulled over to chat. She lives on the beach but hadn't suffered any damage, and said she'd be in at work soon.

At the hospital, things were again running smoothly, so I sat and had lunch with some colleagues and shared some baked goods I had made. I had originally been scheduled to give a teaching session, but instead we just sat in community. We ate together and shared stories, we talked about how hard it is to practice medicine without internet or phones, how reliant we have become on resources like UpToDate to help us process medical information or prescribe the right dose of medication. And so much of medicine, especially internal medicine, is communication.

Hoping that my presence and raspberry blondies had at least buoyed the spirits of my colleagues a bit, I left the hospital and stopped by to check on some people on the way home. The newest member of our faculty had just bought a house along the river when he started, a lovely older house across from the Botanical Gardens, and I drove by to see how he had fared. He wasn't home, but there was a clear high-water mark about waist high all along the ground floor of their house and cars. Silt and debris cluttered their driveway and yard. Clearly not all of Gisborne was spared by the storm.

The next colleague I visited was luckier. My office mate, we started at the same time last year as American transplants and even were neighbors for a while before they moved to the other side of Wainui. Like us, they have rainwater tanks for water supply and their power was restored, so they were doing reasonably well. The main challenge was keeping their young kids entertained. As we talked, the boys scootered rings around us in the driveway.

In the afternoon, the local paper put out a special edition that was delivered free to every mailbox in the area by a crew of volunteers. They included overviews of the damage, updates on schools, details on the water crisis, and every member of our family read that paper front to back. I can't remember the last time I was so excited to read the news.

The kids were ready for an adventure, so we headed out for a walk around the neighborhood to say hello to families we knew. Everyone was grateful to have survived the storm with minimal immediate damage. Down every street we were met by the sight of neighbors and friends clustered in driveways or on sidewalks, gathered around the latest news like they might around a campfire at night.

Some friends were taking their dog for a walk on the beach, so we joined them and somehow even picked up two extra kids that are school mates of N's, making for quite the gaggle of humanity parading down the street and onto the beach. The kids walked ahead, apparently untroubled by the drizzle, clumping together to swap storm stories. When it was time to head home to make dinner, O wasn't done and went on walking with our friends and their dog, and they dropped him back off a while later.

Putting the kids to bed that night, I reflected with gratitude on the friendships they have forged and the community we have found in our 10 months here. I stepped out into the night and looked up at the night. I was startled by the brilliance of the stars and the long arc of the Milky Way. The skies had cleared. The storm, it seemed, had passed.

Schools were closed again the next day, and the day after. Understandably, they didn't feel they could safely open with no communications. If there were a crisis at school they wouldn't be able to notify emergency services or families. So, our kids finished their jigsaw puzzle and tore through the books in the house and played music and made up new games to pass the time. They biked to the neighborhood store for ice cream and spent hours on the beach.

Other kids stopped by and knocked on our door to invite our kids to play, and so they passed the days with no screens and no devices and no school, just pretend play and board games and crafts and building blocks and sticks, lots of sticks.

Meanwhile, typical errands proved more challenging than usual. Grocery stocks were limited, though the government managed to start getting supplies in quickly. At first, these were deliverd by Army caravan through the closed highway through the Waioeka Gorge and by air, then eventually by the Navy ship Manawanui that docked at our port with supplies of food and fresh water and even desalinating capabilities to continue to generate clean water.

We quickly realized a major hole in our preparations was money. With internet out, credit cards and debit cards didn't work. Our typically cashless economy suddenly became a cash only economy and we were ill-prepared. O kindly lent the family his allowance savings and a few friends shared some extra cash they had stored. Our neighborhood cafe even let us get a couple things on an IOU.

Within a few days, Civil Defence (similar to the US National Guard) had set up satellite connections at the major grocery stores so they could run credit transactions, but the lines at the stores typically stretched around the corner. Meanwhile, some people were so desperate for cash that when a rumor went around about an ATM coming online, people lined up from dawn in lawn chairs waiting their turn. Even when police arrived to let them know it would not be opening yet, they still waited, not wanting to miss the chance to replenish their cash.

For communication, the district council (similar to a town council or county government) set up a satellite link at their headquarters and opened it to the public for people to communicate with loved ones. And so it was that I arrived, after 4 days of no communication with anyone outside of our region, to the district council offices and felt that familiar vibration in my pocket as my phone downloaded the hours of messages and notifications I had missed. I stood amongst a crowd on the steps and sent out a few succinct messages. It was hard to convey both the reassurance that we were fine but also the significance of what had happened, the bizarre combination of crisis and utter calm that we had experienced for the last 4 days.

People gather on the steps of the District Council to utilize the satellite internet to communicate outside of the region for the first time in 4 days

All around I heard snippets of reconnection, of reassurance. One man nearby said, "We're fine, the house is ok, the baby is fine. Yes, I went home to sleep last night but I'm going back up to Maternity after this." It was overwhelming to think of the countless stories of heartache and tragedy and resilience that huddled near me on those steps overlooking the river.

I worked the weekend on the inpatient medicine service. With phones and internet still out, I carried a pager to be contactable, though I had no way to respond. And so it was, just as we were sitting down to dinner friday night, my pager buzzed. Maybe because I was at the edge of its functional range, the message was garbled and unintelligible, but I suppose it didn't matter anyway. I couldn't call back even if they had sent a number. I headed back to the hospital.

I found my team in the ED working on admitting some new patients. They had a couple questions and we talked through the plan for the patients. These were the kind of questions that are common from the trainees as they develop their independence in clinical care and an important part of their training, but usually can be easily handled over the phone from home. But with no phones, the only way to work through them was in person.

Of course, once I was there, the ED docs wanted to discuss a different patient, and by that time, there were a few more questions that were better answered before I left. Eventually I got back home a couple hours after that page, having dealt with routine issues that normally would have only required a few 5 minute phone calls. Medicine is challenging without functional communication.

Buckets to catch leaks in the halls of the hospital

The challenges continued throughout the weekend. For example, we had a patient waiting to be transferred to the cardiology service at our referral center in Hamilton for a procedure we can't do here in Gisborne. The flight team had transported another patient there early on Saturday and came back with a message from the cardiology team suggesting a medication change, but the details were fuzzy. I couldn't call on a regular phone, but we had a satellite phone available in the ICU.

I followed the instructions for using it and walked out into the open grass behind the hospital for a clear view of the sky. Eventually I reached the operator there, but couldn't get an intelligible connection with the cardiologist. I wandered across the grass having one of those frustrating "Sorry, can you repeat that? I still didn't get the 2nd word" conversations. In the end, I hung up. The ICU manager suggested the command center, where I was able to use the satellite internet to make a WiFi call, but by that time the cardiologist that had sent the message had gone home and one of his colleagues was on call who had no knowledge of the plan. I made the medication change I thought he had in mind and emailed to let him know.

On Sunday, I was once again at home when the pager buzzed. At the time, I was playing with N at the beach, but she kindly ended her game and came back to the house with me. When we arrived, I heard from E that the internet had been restored while we were gone. I was able to call back to the hospital, only to learn that a critically ill patient had been admitted with sepsis, bleeding from his gut, and a failing heart. So, once again I left as dinner was being served and headed to the hospital, but this time for the kind of assistance that would be needed no matter the state of communication.

I spent the next 4 hours working with the team to stabilize this critically ill patient. I returned home with the satisfaction of having been challenged and having collectively risen to the challenge with competence and confidence. It was a relief to get back to pure medicine.

As I write, we are a month out from Cyclone Gabrielle. Some roads have reopened, but not all. The highway south to Hawke's Bay is still closed and the detour doubles the travel time from less than 3 to more than 6 hours. North of us, some communities like Tokomaru Bay are still cut off, so I do telehealth visits with my patients there and the medicines I prescribe arrive by helicopter. Other communities, such as Te Karaka and Wairoa, still have whole neighborhoods covered in feet of silt and muck. The water supply to the city has been partially repaired and just this past week the water restrictions eased by one level to now allow limited outdoor use for the first time since the cyclone. The recovery is staggered and patchwork, with some areas seemingly back to normal and others still in crisis.

At the hospital, communication is restored, but we are not yet whole. Staffing shortages exacerbated by the cyclone and years of pandemic stress have built into a crisis that leaves our inpatient wards chronically understaffed and severely limits our ability to provide outpatient care. This just adds to the ongoing problems with access to health care in our communities, and means more people are showing up with advanced diseases and opportunities to intervene are being missed.

As our community tries to recover and rebuild, we are also trying to reconcile the role human activities played in the devastation from this storm. We know the climate crisis has warped weather patterns and may have contributed to the intensity of this storm. But on a local level, the flooding was enabled by land management--flood plains have been developed and wetlands drained, removing the natural sponges and buffers that regulated flooding for millenia before us. Generations of deforestation have denuded this once-lush landscape and replaced it with a patchwork of pasture that feeds contaminated runoff into our waterways and vast swaths of commercial forestry land that has not delivered on the promise of erosion control.

After the last major cyclone in this region, Cyclone Bola in 1988, government policies incentivized the planting of pine forests with the idea that they would reduce erosion, but these forests have been harvested with widespread clear cutting, leaving a landscape as vulnerable as ever to erosion. Logging remnants are washed downstream, clog waterways, and pile up at bridges, raising floodwaters like matted hair in the shower drain. The result is collapsed bridges, pipes, and conduits, including the city water supply line.

Photo from Tairawhiti Civil Defence showing forestry slash around a collapsed bridge

Beaches all along this coastline are littered with debris and logs, collectively known as forestry slash. These rotting carcasses of trees have been flushed from the land all around the coast and carried to the ocean on rivers churned brown with silt, only to be regurgitated onto the shore at our feet. Water quality was poor for weeks after the storm, precluding swimming in the ocean and severely damaging local food staples such as paua (abalone) and kina (sea urchin). Hundreds of dead koura (crayfish) have littered some nearby beaches. I had to warn the kids not to play in Wainui Stream after the storm because the water was contaminated with high levels of bacteria from agricultural runoff.

Our community is taking note of these ghosts of our misdeeds, trying to reset and repair our relationship with the lands and waters that sustain us. A local movement has requested an inquiry into forestry practices, including monoculture of pine (an introduced species) and clear cutting. Farmers are redoubling erosion control efforts such as riparian planting and selective rewilding of unproductive plots. There is so much to do to restore some of the resilience this landscape previously possessed.

For our family, we are grateful to have emerged from this crisis unscathed. The kids are back in school. Our pots and mixing bowls are back in their cupboards. The time we spent cut off from the world was a welcome reprieve from the daily inundation of our attention and left me scheming how we could craft a home life without internet and its insistent interruptions, at least part of the time. We were different people in that space, and time moved differently. The days were broader, more expansive somehow--like fully expanded lungs, replete with air, which is to say, possibility.

I was surprised to hear colleagues describe similar ideas of carving out regular "airplane mode" times and even electricity-free days. Like the pandemic, the cyclone ripped away our daily dramas, the worries we wrap ourselves in, leaving us raw and vulnerable but more capable of connection. In the healing, we see opportunities for reimagining, for more intentional living built around meaningful interactions, around presence in the physical world, around engagement with activities that bring joy and connection. I think of those hungry conversations with parents at school, those clusters of neighbors huddled around the latest news as if around a campfire, the gaggle of kids wandering down the beach ahead of us through the drizzle. I think of the appreciation we had for running water and electricity and dry clothes in those first days after the storm. I hope we can emerge from this crisis not only unscathed, but wiser and more capable.

But I do not want to minimize the suffering. It was still a disaster. This is not a story that ends with a "but" and a redeeming message. The storm was devastating. People are still suffering. And some of us have been able, by the vagaries of circumstance, to learn from it. Both narratives are true.

The storm fractured this countryside, broke this corner of the world clean off, and the wound is still healing. Like all fractures, how it heals will depend on how well it is set, how well it is supported as it heals, how much time is given to the healing process, how much we nourish the body that sustains it.

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