Source: Radio New Zealand
Banks Peninsula farmers and businesses are counting the cost of devastating flooding that swamped paddocks and swept through Little River.
The peninsula remained under a state of emergency although State Highway 75 from Christchurch to Akaroa reopened on Wednesday afternoon and telecommunications were restored after widespread outages.
About 120 properties remained without power and at least 15 local roads were closed because of slips and flooding.
Kinloch farmer Tom Power said the “mental” rain caused the worst flooding he had ever seen.
Kinloch Road farm in Little River was flooded. Nathan Mckinnon
“I’ve never seen anything like it. It was predicted to be 100 millimetres or so and we ended up tipping out 430 millimetres in this catchment. It was chaos,” he said.
“I’ve never seen anything through Little River like that before and even up Okuti Valley, properties up there. It’s so widespread, it’s unbelievable.”
Power was dealing with stock losses as paddocks remained under water, with troughs and fences swept away and debris strewn across the property.
“We moved a lot of stock away to traditionally high areas that we’ve never seen go under water. We spent hours doing that beforehand and we were prepared for a lot of it, it was just the severity,” he said.
Flood damage in Little River. Nathan Mckinnon
“We’re still trying to get our head around what the damage is, to be fair, until the water goes away you don’t really know.
“People’s livelihoods have been well and truly affected by this, which is a crying shame.”
In Little River, Déjà New Preloved Goods owner Lisa Ashfield had cleared mud and silt from her shop with the help of firefighters – the second time her business had flooded in 12 months.
Flood damage at Deja New in Little River. Nathan Mckinnon
“I imagine this is probably the end of the shop,” she said.
“All of my furniture, my bookshelves, my storage units, people’s home-made jewellery, toys, books, clothes, furniture. Everything is just a mudbath,” she said.
“I was flooded in May last year, about 300 millimetres, over the top of your gumboots kind of level. This flood, unfortunately, was thigh-deep. All the preparation we did on Monday, raising everything off the floor, just wasn’t high enough,” she said.
Déjà New Preloved Goods Little River owner Lisa Ashfield said she’d been flooded twice in 12 months. Nathan Mckinnon/RNZ
Ashfield was now sorting through stock to work out what to throw in a skip.
Little River Cafe & Store owner Cameron Gordon also spent the day shovelling mud and silt from the building after water gushed in on Tuesday.
He said food from the chiller had to be thrown away and fridges and freezers would need replacing but he hoped to open the store by the end of the day and the cafe by the weekend.
Little River Cafe and Store. Nathan Mckinnon
Gordon was heartened by the support of locals who were helping to clean up the mess.
“They’re pretty keen to get the shop back going and get us up and running again. We got a lot of calls, a lot of messages overnight with people offering help, a lot of tools brought down, water blasters, squeegees and brooms and random people I haven’t met before. It’s great,” he said.
Gordon said the cafe had flooded five times, most recently last May when a foot of water washed through some businesses, but he had never seen flooding so bad in his 20 years living in the settlement.
He said water in Little River drained away quickly once Lake Forsyth was opened to the sea on Tuesday afternoon.
Outside the shop on Wednesday. Nathan Mckinnon
“If it was opened before this I think we would have had a lot less damage and probably a lower level through the building,” he said.
“[The council] seem to have their rules and their guidelines about how they monitor all that but it doesn’t seem to work for us. It seems to be the same story every year, with the same excuses every year as well.”
Living Streams Community Nursery co-ordinator Nicky Steinmetz said raging floodwaters had left a layer of silt over the plants, leaving a months-long clean-up job.
“Most of our volunteers will be really upset about what they see. It’s the small seedlings that will be most impacted, rather than the bigger plants. We’ll be able to wash those down, but it’s going to take forever,” she said.
Flood damage at Little River nursery. Nathan Mckinnon
Emergency Management Minister Mark Mitchell and Christchurch mayor Phil Mauger visited Little River on Wednesday.
Mitchell told RNZ the flooding was worse than in May 2025.
“They’re in the middle of their summer season so we’ve got to do everything we can to support them and get them back on their feet as quickly as we can,” he said.
Boil water notices remained in place for Little River and Wainui.
Mauger said the water supply in Wainui was “absolute toast”.
The clean up inside the Little River Cafe and Store. Nathan Mckinnon
The council had sent Starlink WiFi devices to Akaroa and Wainui, although Chorus found and fixed a damaged fibre cable on a bridge that restored cell tower connections on Wednesday afternoon.
Students on two school trips who were stuck at Wainui and Ōnuku Marae had returned home.
Provisional figures from Earth Sciences New Zealand showed 243 millimetres of rain was recorded at its site in Akaroa in the 24 hours to 9am on Tuesday morning.
That was the highest 24-hour rainfall total for Akaroa in the month of February since records began in 1977, the organisation said.
Earth Sciences said Akaroa had received 316 millimetres of rain so far this month, making it the wettest February on record.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
