The air in the Hastings District Court feels heavy this week, filled with the raw, jagged edges of stories that nobody should ever have to tell. We are listening to the accounts of those who survived Cyclone Gabrielle, and the echoes of those who didn’t. It’s hard to sit there and listen—really listen—to the details of that February night in 2023. You can almost smell the damp, cold intensity of the floodwater when the witnesses speak, a smell of mud and ruin that clearly still clings to their memories.
Two-year-old Ivy Collins was the youngest life taken that night. Her mother, Ella, stood before the court and laid out a simple, devastating truth: they wouldn’t have been there if they had been warned. They went to sleep trusting the digital updates from local councils, unaware that a wall of water was coming for their home. By 4 a.m., their world had tilted into a nightmare of floating furniture and desperate, dark-water chaos. Ella described the exact moment the current ripped Ivy from her shoulders. She screamed for her husband, Jack, but the water just kept moving.
It’s almost impossible to process the scale of what they went through—the scramble for the neighbor’s roof, the broken spine, the absolute terror of the dark. Ella and Jack survived, but they lost their daughter. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? The preventable nature of it all. It lingers in the room, this feeling that a few words from an official warning system might have changed everything. Or maybe not—but the lack of communication haunts them more than the water itself.
Then there’s Gareth Jones, who was house-sitting up in the Esk Valley. He and his friend Susane Caccioppoli ended up on a roof, realizing they were likely going to die. I think about what he said—how they spent their final moments together talking about their kids. He held onto her until the very last second, until something in the churning water tore them apart. He washed up in a quarry, somehow still breathing, but Susane didn’t. The grief in his voice when he recounted having to let go was just… well, it’s not something you can easily put into words.
Bianka-Lee Bryan, Susane’s daughter, spoke about the agony of the wait. Five days of silence from authorities. Five days of rumors and searching while official channels stayed quiet. That kind of void is a special kind of cruelty.
The inquest is grinding on through the rest of the week, with more families of the thirteen who died in Hawke’s Bay preparing to speak. Coroner Woolley has been listening intently, acknowledging that the system failed these people. Proactive evacuations. That’s the goal now. But for the Collins family, and for everyone else who sat in that courtroom, the system’s realization comes far too late. They are left to figure out how to live in a world where the worst has already happened.