TRACY LABY

The night before I had cleaned the house. The kids were away and I totally cleaned everything up so when the kids came back, they’d come back to a nice clean house. It was never cleaned again, not like it was that night. Cosmetically the house didn’t look too damaged, but walk into it and you felt sick because of the way it leaned; the way it had sunk. And the water, it must have been a couple of hours before that slowed up. I can’t remember the exact time, but it did eventually slow down. You could hear it, this gushing noise and you could see these things come out like Rotorua geysers.

Crazy, but you started to wonder were we going to have a tsunami and should we be getting to higher ground? My ex-husband helped me out; came over to get me and took me back to his place. Before we actually left, I insisted on hanging out the washing. What a bizarre thing to do; it was in the washing machine and I wasn’t going to have it left in there smelling. So I hung the washing out; standing in water. It took me quite a while to come around to it.

Eventually I thought, okay, the house is probably going to be a write-off.  It may take a couple of years, but you’ll get a new house down the track. In the meantime, we can stay here, we can live here. Three or four of the neighbors had moved out straight away, but we stayed. I imagined we’d be all right; but no, it was awful. Every time something went by the whole place shuddered and rattled. It wasn’t pleasant, however, I had in my mind that eventually we’d be okay and that’s what I tried to tell the kids. ‘Everything will be alright, we’ll be okay,’ I even got a video put down the drains and they were okay. There were a couple of wee cracks but we started to use the toilet again just before February and then on the morning of the 22nd, the car went back in the garage. Yeah, they came out that morning and fixed the garage door. I was so rapt, I could push the door open and shut and I thought, ‘Yay,’ small miracles and then two hours later–well, you know the story, it was all stuff again.