Kopuawhara Flash Flood:

The deadliest flash flood in New Zealand history occurred in the Kopuawhara stream between Gisborne and Wairoa in February 1938. In the middle of a Saturday night, the stream rose rapidly by five metres after thunderstorms in the coastal hills. Carrying logs and rolling boulders, it became an 80 m wide torrent, inundating 47 miners’ huts in a railway construction camp. Twenty-one people drowned.

As floodwaters spilled over the river bank, Tom Tracy ran about the camp, ringing the diner gong, knocking on hut doors and dragging people from their beds. He saved many lives but tragically lost his own when chest deep floodwaters swept him away. The access bridge into the camp broke up and its timbers were driven through the campsite like battering rams.

Many survivors had dramatic escapes. One man, R. Blair, woken by a friend’s shouts, had barely got to his feet when his hut collapsed around him. Struggling out from under the debris, he found himself up to his neck in water but managed to grab onto a log. As it floated downstream, the log approached a 4.5 ton truck with 11 men on it. They called for Blair to join them, but he had no way of doing so; then the truck rolled over and the men were swept away.

The log continued downstream and bumped into the cookhouse, which had lost a wall but was still standing. Blair managed to clamber onto its roof and join the dozen others seeking refuge there. Another hut floated by with a man clinging to its roof and he also managed to leap across to the cookhouse. One of the men was lost when he went into the water to search for a waitress whose hut had been nearby. The only women to die in the tragedy, she had probably already been swept away.

By this stage the cookhouse was starting to collapse and the men jumped across to the roof of the caterer’s quarters. A number of others gradually joined them there, including the caterer and his wife, who were helped up by three men who climbed down to rescue them. All but one of the people on the roof survived. The five year old daughter of the caterers was held above the floodwaters for more than an hour by an elderly man who had tied himself to a hut with an electric cable.

The flow of water measured in the nearby Mangakotukutuku stream was so large it corresponded to a rainfall of 130 mm in an hour over its catchment area. In another stream, north of Gisborne the flood rose to a depth of almost 20m. Debris was found tangled in the top of a telephone pole.