“I thought you were dead,” Philip Barber said to his brother Chris when the pair were reunited for the first time on Thursday after floodwaters tore through their community in Esk Valley on New Zealand’s North Island.
The siblings live next to each other, and Philip could do nothing but sit and watch in horror as his brother’s house was engulfed by water and silt in the early hours of Tuesday morning as Cyclone Gabrielle hit.
While Philip made it onto his roof, Chris and his family were panicking inside their home as the waters rose rapidly around them.
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He said to his wife: “Luciana we’ve got to do a last call [to 111] – SOS, this is it. And the guy on the phone said, ‘Can you smash a hole in the ceiling?'”
Chris grabbed one of his son’s toy railway tracks and started punching at the plaster ceiling.
“We all got up there and just hoped [the water] wasn’t going to come through the ceiling,” he said, his voice cracking as he recounted the horror.
For close to six hours Chris, Luciana, their children Oliver, 7, and Sofia, 5, and puppy Barley huddled in their roof cavity, hoping and praying the water wouldn’t rise any higher. There they sat, wet and cold, hugging insulation for warmth and waiting for the rain to stop.
All they could hear was their furniture bobbing beneath them, smacking the ceiling, and cyclonic winds overhead.
When Tuesday finally dawned the water had started to recede, brick by brick.
The family heard a motor outside, and they frantically began banging on the roof, shouting, “In the roof, we’re in the roof!”
“They had this big inflatable and thick wetsuits,” said Chris. “I said, ‘Are you guys the navy?’ and they said, ‘Na we’re just three Māori boys’. I call them Navy Seals now.”
It was brother Philip who sent the boat towards the house, and at first he expected the worst.
“They were ages looking for them and I thought … ‘they’re dead for sure’, and then after quite a while, must have been half an hour, I saw a boat going past.
“That was the dog and the kids and I thought, ‘F—, they’re alive’, and I felt so happy. Happiest I’ve ever been in my life”.
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They got as far out of the floodwater as the boat would allow and were greeted by retired farmer Joy, who has housed and fed the family for the past two nights.
Chris and Philip shared an emotional embrace as they were reunited on Thursday, both men breaking down at the gravity of the situation and how close they had come to losing each other as they stood on the mountain of silt and mud that has enveloped and shattered their homes.
Luciana says the kids are doing remarkably well.
“They’re happy … considering everything they’ve gone through. They just have no idea, the innocence has kept them going and still laughing and smiling. That’s so important for us.”
Chris and Luciana are still trying to make sense of what happened.
They say the force of the water was “really frightening”.
The Esk Valley was given little warning about the rain.
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Luciana said she did see the fire service performing checks around 11pm on a nearby house, but when she asked they said they were evacuating people, but it wasn’t mandatory.
The Barbers said the water rose so quickly it didn’t feel safe to leave in their car, so they heeded the advice of the person at the other end of the 111 call and stayed put.
“It’s just unbelievable. I’m just so happy to get out,” Chris said through tears.