When Woman’s Day asks Hawke’s Bay kennel owner Diane O’Neill how she’s coping in the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle, she just offers a long sigh.
“It’s disgusting down here,” she says. “But all the dogs are OK. That’s the main thing.”
As floodwaters roared towards her kennel with 60 dogs inside – some hers, some from her doggy daycare and some English pointers that she breeds – Diane and members of her whānau sprang into action, determined to leave no pup behind at Chesterhope Kennels, even as her rural road turned into a river.
Chesterhope Kennels under water.
“We just formed a convoy of cars and trailers, then got all of them into crates as quickly as we could,” the Pākōwhai resident tells. “Moving the dogs was so scary. Our little road was a raging river – it took me 25 minutes to walk 10 metres, the current was so strong.
“We loaded them up and headed for the school, which is on the highest ground around here. My husband had always said, ‘If it ever floods in Pākōwhai, get to the school.’ We had to break in to house
the dogs – I was on the phone with the alarm company trying to explain!”
As the water rose around Diane, her pack of pooches, her daughters and her grandkids, as well as a dozen or so other local residents (and a fair few angry cats!), they realised they were trapped in the school until they were able to be rescued by jet boat, leaving the dogs secure in the building until they could get back the next day.
A dog’s eye view of the disaster.
“It was so scary,” Diane remembers. “You just don’t think these types of things happen in New Zealand. You see it on the news in other countries, not here, but it did.
“I didn’t once think, ‘Bugger the dogs!’ You just keep going because you have to. It wasn’t until the night when I got to bed that I went into shock when I thought about everything that happened during the day.”
Diane managed to get all 60 canines to safety.
With all of the pets in her charge now returned to their very grateful owners – “I had a lot of lovely conversations and phone calls!” – Diane’s attention has now turned to her own home, where she’s currently in the middle of ripping down all of her walls.
“We’ve lost everything,” she tells. “The hardest day for me was when everything we owned was thrown into a skip. But the silver lining to all this is the outpouring of support – there’s incredible people down here delivering food and helping. It’s how it should be in times like these.”
