‘We’ll start again’: The long journey after the flood

Sunday, 26 April 2026

Days after Wellington residents fled their homes in the dark, life is settling into a grim new normal. Amy Ridout talks to the residents who are trying to pick up the pieces.

Until Monday, Tahni Daniels’ life seemed pretty perfect.

The home hair salon business she’d spent six years building in Wellington’s Berhampore was in a good place with a busy client roster. Originally from the UK, Daniels had spotted a niche she could work with in Wellington: curly hair.

“I set it up because there was no one that could do my hair, and I wanted to help other people embrace their hair.”

Daniels is now well known as a teacher and a stylist, and it was this reputation that saw her head to Sydney last weekend for industry event Maneland.

She was set to appear onstage on Monday when she woke to a phone full of messages.

Back home on Emerson St, her partner, Neal Jenkins, had woken in the small hours to rising water. He described a cascade of water pouring into the garden: “Like a tsunami”.

As it came up through the floorboards, Jenkins grabbed their terrified children, aged 3 and 6, and headed upstairs.

Daniels immediately headed home. While she had seen photos, it wasn’t until she stepped into her home that the full impact hit her.

Downstairs, everything was covered with a thick layer of silt. In her front-room salon, products and furniture had shifted, settling into the silt that caked the floor.

Though the grime, you can see the care and thought Daniels channelled into the once immaculate space.

“It's been like the perfect business, I thought I had a perfect life. I’m always busy, so many people wanted to see me and it’s been so much fun.”

A week before the water came, the couple had installed new double glazed doors and windows through the house.

“We were really proud of it: new doors and windows for winter, and now we can’t use them.”

The storm that burst over Wellington in the small hours of Monday morning delivered some 77 millimetres of rain, prompting evacuations and a region-wide state of emergency. No one had seen it coming: not even forecasters.

On Thursday, a $100,000 mayoral relief fund was announced. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of the damage, which Wellington Mayor Andrew Little estimated to be in the hundreds of millions.

While Little said the cost of buying out flood-hit homes was beyond his council, he indicated the city could turn to the Government.

“Minister for Local Government Simon Watts has said just let us know if there’s any help you might need at some point, so we will keep those channels open,” Little said.

Daniels and her young family decamped to an Airbnb. Yesterday, they shifted into a rental in Newtown, where they’ll stay for six months.

An insurance assessor visited on Wednesday, the first step in what Daniels guessed would be a long journey to remedy the home.

On Friday, the couple were working to clear the house in preparation for builders to start removing floors and walls.

They can’t do much else until insurance was settled, but their home faced big changes, Daniels said.

“We’re looking at paying $100,000 to raise the house. It’s all very well getting it fixed but why do that when it could happen again?”

Even as the couple sifted through their belongings, trudging back and forth along the sodden hallway, Daniels was thinking about work, and hunting for a new salon space.

She’d had heaps of offers, and it didn’t take her long to find a temporary home for her business: a chair in a small home-based salon in Miramar.

She’ll be back at work from Tuesday, which seemed a little surreal while still standing in the ruins of her old salon.

“I can’t really think of work, but I have to, right? I need to start making money again.”

Her children, who screamed in terror when they woke to rising water on Monday, are still processing what happened.

“They keep saying ‘I've got a tummy ache’. They’re unsettled, I think they're a bit traumatised. Charlie had lots of nightmares the last few nights.”

The children’s ground floor bedroom was a casualty, the once cheerful space with its colourful curtains now dank and smelly with sludge.

Daniels and Jenkins’ belongings, including passports and documents, had been upstairs, untouched by the waters.

But everything their children owned was destroyed, including her son’s precious Lego.

“It’s been in the water, and could be contaminated.”

This loss hurt, Daniels said. “I’d rather it had been my stuff.

“But oh well, we’ll start again I guess.”

Starting again wouldn’t be easy, acknowledged Little.

“People have got through the first few days and now it's the tough job of dealing with cleaning up, dealing with valued possessions…getting new accommodation and stuff.

“I think the emotions are starting to come to the surface now.”

Little told the Sunday Star-Times that the council was working with City Mission/Whakamaru to support several displaced families.

“We want to make sure they get permanent accommodation… The aim would be to help them relocate; until they are relocated we won’t stop trying to help them.”

On Thursday, Murray Edridge from Whakamaru said the centre was supporting 40 families.

“People are getting on with their lives and coping with what they have until they run out of the capacity to do that.

“We are going to see an ongoing trickle of people coming to us. We're dealing with practical things at the moment, but for many people, the trauma of what's happened hasn't really hit and we will see that in the days and weeks to come.”

Bibi Hawkes is determined to help her displaced tenants, who rent the flat beneath hers at the bottom of Emerson St, where flood waters had surged over two metres.

The family of four had turned up dripping wet and in shock in the small hours, and Hawkes has been trying to help them navigate the disorienting and scary situation.

New migrants, with two children, the family had just set themselves up with new furniture and household items, Hawkes said.

“They’re still paying them off, they’ve lost everything, they’re homeless. They can’t get any help yet, and they don’t know how the system works.”

It will be months until their home is liveable again, but Hawkes says she’ll do what she can for them.

“I've heard stories from our tenants about people in the same situation whose landlords are like, ‘lease terminated, not our problem. Get your shit out.’ I can’t believe that.”

Hawkes’ neighbours have heart-in-mouth stories about fleeing in the night.

Grabbing dogs and babies, they ran, climbing over fences and scrambling up slippery banks to escape rising waters.

In one home, an 87-year-old trapped in a bedroom was shunted into the top of a wardrobe as her daughter treaded water.

Nurse Amita Flores’ voice shook as she described wading through chest-deep water in her back garden. She’d genuinely feared for her life, and as she’d clutched her dog and headed for safety, she’d thought about her elderly mum in the Philippines.

“I thought, I don't want to go home in a coffin. What if I will die, then my mum will not see me.”

The children’s nurse has lived in New Zealand for decades, and Monday night was the scariest experience she’d had here.

She wasn’t sure when she would return home, and what her future would look like.

“I really want to stay because we like this community, but with the fear of another big flood, that's quite scary. Just imagine going through this again.

“Yes, insurance will pay us, but it’s still hard work.”

Shiva Gupta owns the Crown Indian restaurant in Island Bay. He’s spent hours cleaning this week: backbreaking work lifting the carpets and sorting through equipment and stock.

Now the adrenaline has ebbed, Gupta faces a hard climb back towards a semblance of normal.

By Friday, an insurance assessor had visited to check out the damage to the building, which belonged to Gupta’s landlord. Assessing the impact on his business would take longer, the business owner had been told.

As a single dad who works up to 70 hours a week, he faced a daunting journey.

“If you are alone, it’s too many things. You can’t do everything, you can’t think.”

He’s not sure when he’ll reopen. The floors are sticky where the carpet has been ripped up. He will need new furniture, a new bar fridge.

Monday had started normally. Gupta had just dropped his children, aged 12 and 7, to school when he got a call from a friend, asking if he was OK.

“I said, yes? Everything’s normal.” But when he headed to the restaurant, he found sodden carpets, ruined furniture and equipment, and thick silt covering the floor.

“It was terrible. You know, you can’t imagine. I’ve spent 20 years in New Zealand, I’ve never seen anything like that.”

But Gupta wasn’t entirely surprised. He’s seen flooding before: in 2022 and 2024 water lapped at his doorstep after heavy rain, and he sent photos to Wellington City Council.

During heavy rain, the camber of the street caused water to pool on a 100m stretch of the street, he said.

But this time, the water came in the dark, and he wasn’t ready to sandbag, or move his equipment.

Retired former UN disaster reduction advisor Reid Basher - who is Wellington based and described the deluge as astonishing - says New Zealand’s storm cycle is fairly engrained at this point, although they are getting stronger, but what’s also entrenched is the country’s response.

“People say ‘we have to do something’ and then we go back to business as usual. Three new bills are being passed through Parliament on planning, emergency management and natural environments and none of them have disaster risk in them. It’s just not a concept there among the thinking,” he says.

But while he describes government “neglect”, those who are tuned in to risk aversion are more likely to be seen as the bad guys - insurers who up premiums or pull out of communities completely in response to increasing risk.

“I think the insurance industry is going to play a very big role [in major change] they are almost like the only group in society that really understand what we’re facing,” Basher says.

“They’re bringing in risk-based insurance policy, premiums where it actually covers the risk that we’re facing. I think that’s really sensible, and there is an important point to that - if suddenly you see this is a risk area, we better do something about it. It promotes disaster risk reduction, it promotes policies to make these less risky practices.”

John Tookey, professor of construction at AUT’s school of future environments, says this week’s flood is another example of “long policy issues writ large”.

“You’re going to end up with buildings that are uninsurable. As soon as you have a Lim report that has a flooding event, you have a scenario where the property is unsaleable.”

For Crown Indian’s Shiva Gupta, he’s not sure what’s next. When asked if he was thinking about moving, the restaurateur said he was 49, and he’s worked hard to get where he is.

Besides, between work and children, there’s not a lot of space to think about the future.

But the water will come again, he believed, and he asked what the council would do to improve the street.

“It’s part of life, but every year it’s happened.”