Learning from the past and looking to the future are some of the key messages of an event to mark the 40th anniversary of one of South Canterbury’s most devastating floods.
Overnight on March 12, 1986 between 150mm-200mm of intense rain fell, causing rivers to rise rapidly and homes, farmland and infrastructure around the region to become inundated.
Pleasant Point was one of the most heavily impacted areas and on Saturday, a special commemoration event will be held at the Pleasant Point Town Hall to mark 40 years since floodwaters tore through the small township.
The event is set to feature a photo display in the town hall and a large emergency vehicle display outside in Halstead Rd.
Point Flood 40 organising chairman and former volunteer firefighter John Cross said the idea for an event to mark the 40th anniversary came to him while he was out walking on last year’s anniversary.
‘‘I happened to go past the house where another fireman is still living and I said to him ‘what were you doing 39 years ago today?’ ‘Oh yeah, flood day’,’’ he said.
‘‘We got to talking about it . . . and we came to the agreement that we should do something about it next year because nothing had been and in 10 years time a lot of the people that still remember it and were actively involved, well we won’t be here any more, Mr Cross said.’’
A volunteer firefighter at the time of the flood, he recalled waking up on the morning of March 13 and realising something might be wrong when he noticed the milkman had not delivered.
‘‘It had been bucketing down with rain at night, and in the morning, it was blue sky, but the bloody milkman hadn’t been. I jumped in the car and got as far as the fire station.
‘‘The local policeman Geoff Smith was there, and the fire chief Bill Dockerty was there along with a couple others. I stopped to see what was going on and then 10 days later we finished with all this [the clean up].’’
Another memory he had was heading to a house and helping a family get in to a helicopter to evacuate.
‘‘I had this three-month-old baby in my arms, taking it to the helicopter in water up to my waist and my feet got tangled in a fence that had been tipped over.
‘‘That was where my fire brigade training came in and I just froze, walked backed, lifted my feet up, shuffled around and got over the obstacle to put the baby in the helicopter while one of the parents was anxiously watching.’’
Now a member of the Civil Defence group in Pleasant Point, Mr Cross said he wanted the big takeaways from the upcoming event to be about remembering what had happened, what the situation was like back then but also the advancements made since 1986 to strengthen the district’s ability to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to emergency events.
‘‘What we look at is what are some of the the major events that would constitute an emergency here in Pleasant Point? And then looking at the developments that have actually taken place since 1986.
‘‘Communications are a lot better now than they were then, and monitoring of rain and river flows has improved considerably.
‘‘If this [event] gets out across the country, what we want to say is here is what happened in 1986 and here’s a community that’s recovered from that and is more resilient.’’
He also cited the construction of a secondary stopbank in the 1990s and the commissioning of the Opuha Dam as important factors for mitigating flooding in the future.
Saturday’s event will run from 10am-4pm and the section of Halstead Rd from Main Rd to Harris St will be closed from 8am-5pm as part of the display.
