21 drown in Kopuawhara flash flood

Twenty men and one woman were drowned when a sudden cloudburst sent a wall of water surging through a public works camp in the Kopuawhara Valley, near Māhia. This was New Zealand’s deadliest 20th-century flood.

Located on the banks of the Kopuawhara Stream, the no. 4 camp had been established for workers building the Wairoa–Gisborne railway. Houses for married men were on higher ground, with a cookhouse and huts for 47 single men closer to the riverbank.

While the stream was in flood after heavy rain, its level had been higher previously and there was no sense of danger. No one was prepared for the 5-m-high wall of water that hit the camp sometime after 3 a.m.

One worker woke just as the water breached the banks of the stream and began pouring across the camp site. He tried in vain to raise the alarm, running from hut to hut and frantically beating on doors before being swept away. Men struggled in water up to their necks. Some took refuge on the roofs of their huts, but most of these structures collapsed.

Other workers climbed onto the roof of the cookhouse. This too partly collapsed, but they managed to hang on and were rescued at daybreak. The 11 men who took refuge in one of the work trucks were not so lucky. The force of the water tossed it onto its side and swept its occupants away; remnants of the vehicle were found 12 km downstream.

Image: No. 4 camp after the Kopuawhara flood (Te Ara)