Cyclone Gabrielle: One social media post at a time, community rallies to reconnect ‘uncontactables’

When Cyclone Gabrielle struck, a Wairoa College teacher decided to put her photography skills to use helping worried families find the unaccounted-for.

Paula Couper, who goes by Pinc in Wairoa on Facebook, swapped teaching for volunteering on a rubbish truck in the clean-up effort.

And she also started taking pictures of people in her Wairoa community.

”Every time we stop the truck I jump out and take photos,” she said. Those photos are then posted to a Facebook group that is connecting people.

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By Wednesday 346 people were still unaccounted for, down from a peak of more than 6000 who couldn’t be reached after the cyclone knocked out all phone and internet coverage for days throughout the upper and east of the North Island.

It meant that a simple check in on relatives became near impossible for those not in the immediate towns, especially with roads also cut.

Police want people to report themselves safe via an “I’m alive” police page and people looking for others can file a person inquired for report .

But homegrown Facebook groups also sprang up.

HB Floods Lost Family and Friends is one such group and it was here that Cathy Valliant – in Gisborne with her mother – found a spreadsheet.

The names listed in white were still yet to be accounted for while green meant they were safe.

“My heart did sink when I saw my step-uncle’s name and his girlfriend’s name showing in white amongst all the green,” she said.

She posted about the missing couple on the Facebook page.

And then she spotted one of Pinc in Wairoa’s pictures of her relatives.

She eventually managed to contact her step-uncle via text message to confirm they were okay, but Couper’s Facebook post was a huge reassurance, she said.

“They could be up to their necks in silt and still say they are okay,” Valliant said.

“It’s the Kiwi way.”

In Wairoa, that uncle, Terry O’Connor and his partner Freya McIlroy, had survived the floods and escaped with little damage but went almost a week without phone or internet and had just managed to leave in a four-wheel drive.

Waikato truck driver Richard Lay set up HB Floods Lost Family and Friends.

He was in Wellington, waiting for a Cook Strait ferry two days after the Valentine’s Day floods, but had not been able to contact his mother, a cat breeder in Esk Valley.

He noticed a lot of people on Facebook posting about missing people and came up with the idea of a single place to put them. He thought he would maybe get 500 to 1000 people join. There were 17,400 members by Wednesday afternoon.

“Unfortunately, three people on our list have been found deceased,” he said.

The page got so busy that he put out a call for helpers and got a long list of volunteers.

“[They] have been working around the clock in to the story…. they are the real heroes. I just started the idea – them and the community have made it work”

There were also countless stories of people being found safe and communities rallying to bring comfort to friends and relatives.

And his mum? “ Three days later, she got brought out on a Unimog with a tribe of cats and kittens – all survived.”