‘Like a tsunami’: the role of forestry waste in New Zealand’s cyclone devastation

The sky over Wairoa was blue. After a long night of rain and winds, the sunrise had brought clear skies, the kind of bright, washed cerulean that arrives after a storm.

“It was a beautiful day,” says Terina Henare in the homestead that has been home to her family for generations. Early in the morning, she likes to wake up and look out over the grass behind the house, to the trees and marae [Māori meeting house] in the distance.

“Then I heard my dad yelling: something’s coming.” She looked back, up the driveway. “It was like a tsunami. Things were coming towards us – it wasn’t water. It was mud and trees and debris.

• Terina Henare, above, in her family’s homestead, top.

“We were looking at it, we couldn’t find the concept of what it was, then …” She cuts a hand through the air. “… too late.”

Henare clung to a fence as the deluge raged down the driveway, surging into her family’s home. Thirty minutes later, she and her 70-year-old father, Isaac Henare, had hauled themselves on to the roof, watching the water run through. “We didn’t know what was happening. Up to our necks in water,” says Isaac, who is sitting on a plastic chair in the garage.

• Isaac Henare, who grew up and lives in the Henare homestead, and had to climb on to its roof to escape the torrent of forest debris and mud.

Now, everything the family has left is stacked in the carport. They have carefully shovelled the mud from the house, but the high-water mark remains on the wallpaper, and the lowest foot of the walls has been knocked out – too wet to remain. The homestead is not insured, Isaac says. But he refuses to leave his home, sleeping in a single bed in a room cleared of silt. “We’re going to salvage it.” Isaac says. “We’ll try and do it, best we can.”

• The interior of the Henare homestead

Furniture sits in a smashed pile in the front yard, cars lie crushed in the ditch. Grass and branches have been woven into a thick mat through the wire fences. Everything is coated with several feet of viscous, slate-grey mud. “It was building up, building up where it came from – all this crap,” Isaac says. “Instead of coming through quite slowly, it just broke.”

• Enormous build-ups of logs like this one at Mangatokerau bridge took out bridges across forestry areas in New Zealand.

On Mangatokerau Bridge, in the hills of Tairāwhiti, it is possible to see how that pressure builds up. The bridge itself is cut off to cars, hunks of its concrete cracked and crumbling into the valley below. Peering over the edge, you see not a river, but a solid mass of logs, packing the riverbed and exploding up over the banks. Many bear the signature clean-cut ends of forestry. Spilling out into the fields beyond them is grey silt, metres deep.

• Forestry waste coats Tolaga Bay beach.

The worst-hit areas of Cyclone Gabrielle are littered with scenes like this, where logs have crammed the waterways, forming their own dams and then breaking them with increasingly explosive force. These same scenes have reignited debate about the longstanding issue of waste created by commercial forestry.

New Zealand’s pine forestry sector is rapidly expanding, partly fuelled by demand for carbon credits, but “slash” – the name given to the waste left behind in the form of branches, cut trunks, logs and offcuts – can pose a risk during extreme weather.

Slash may have contributed to the devastation unleashed on the valleys of Hawkes Bay and Tairāwhiti. Those two areas account for nine of the 11 deaths confirmed so far across the country..

On Friday, prime minister Chris Hipkins announced a two-month inquiry into the role of forestry in the disaster. “Things have to change,” he said. “Slash on beaches, in rivers, on farms is unacceptable”.

The claim of damage, however, is one that some forestry companies reject. Bert Hughes, chief executive of Forestry Enterprises, which logs in the Tairāwhiti region, said via email: “I have not seen any evidence that forestry practises have directly caused harm to neighbours … The damage and harm we are seeing is across all land use.”

Aratu Forests and Ernslaw One, two of the largest loggers in the region, and industry body Forest Owners Association did not respond to requests for comment.

Other forestry organisations say tree planting helps stabilise erodible soil, reducing the chances of landslides, though some, such as Forest Owners Association president Grant Dodson, agree that the amount of slash must be reduced.

‘It doesn’t belong here’

Radiata pine forests cloak the hills of Tairāwhiti, in thick, deep green rows, undulating over the slopes. The tree is not native to New Zealand, but it has thrived here – adopted as one of the fastest-growing and most lucrative forestry species.

• Hera Ngata Gibson started a petition to review forestry practices after witnessing enormous damage from forestry waste in storms.

Ngata-Gibson is a leader within Mana Taiao Tairāwhiti, a group that had spent months petitioning government for an inquiry into forestry “slash”. While Cyclone Gabrielle has propelled the question on to the national stage, communities in Tairawhiti have been campaigning for years for regulate the industry, saying intensive pine farming sends a deadly slurry of sediment, logs and debris down the hills in every major weather event.

“This has to be a turning point in our history,” Ngata-Gibson says. She is convinced the country must rethink its whole approach to forestry: replacing monocultural pine plantations with native forest.

“This is the problem when man thinks he knows better than nature, doesn’t know his place,” she says.

• The town of Wairoa

Efforts to rein in the planting and harvesting of pine, however, are pitted against powerful economic drivers in New Zealand.

On the road between Wairoa and Gisborne, you pass by the remains of a high-country sheep and beef farm. Animal fences still stand, but the livestock are gone: in their place are the tufts of pine seedlings, polka-dotting the hillsides. Last year, the government opted to allow fast-growing exotic pine forests to earn carbon credits, to help New Zealand meet its net emissions reduction goals. The move helped fuel a “green gold rush”, with huge numbers of farms converting to forestry or carbon banking. Research in 2022 commissioned by Beef & Lamb, an industry organisation representing sheep and beef farmers, found that farms were being bought to replant with pine at a rate of 50,000 hectares a year – more than double the rate the government had estimated under emissions trading schemes.

• Janina Kopua had her home flooded a second time

Downstream, at a Tolaga Bay beach, Te Waiotu Fairlie picks her way gingerly down the shoreline. Everywhere around her is a sea of shattered pine. For mile after mile, enormous logs line the beach, branches spiking up like the jagged edge of a saw. The cut trunks dwarf the frame of the 15-year-old, who looks out to sea, watching a break she has surfed her whole life. The waves ripple with black debris.

• Te Waiotu Fairlie, 15

“I really love the water,” she says, softly. “Being detached from it – I get really sad. Really anxious, a lot of negative emotions.”

More than half of Tairāwhiti’s population are Māori, and some say the transformation of the environment is threatening their entire way of life: waterways dirtied, native eels dying in the rivers, kina [sea urchin] and crayfish beds suffocated by silt. “Not only does it affect us physically, our land, it ecologically affects us, says Rawinia Kingi. “We whakapapa [have ancestral ties] to these waters.”

The last time Fairlie went out to surf, a log smashed into her board in the water.

“It’s just scary,” she says, “Now that the logs are coming out more and more – and not just with rain, but on their own,” she says.

“I can’t do anything about it,” she says. “I just can’t get all the logs out of the water and I can’t clean the water, and that’s something that really gets me.”

Inland, at Janina Kopua’s home, piles of logs cleared after January’s Cyclone Hale still lie stacked in piles. Less than two months after the last clean-up, her home has been inundated again – filled to knee height with silt. Outside, the rain has been falling all day, pooling in the silt and swelling the rivers, with red and orange weather warnings prompting fresh evacuations and setting communities on edge. “Every big rain we’re anxious,” says Janina. “There’s huge anxiety around what’s gonna come down the river.”

• Riripeti Paine, manager of Age Concern Wairoa, in the organisation’s ruined premises.

At Wairoa bowling club, the scrupulously tended green is a flat expanse of silt, cracking at the edges and holding pools of water at the centre.

Riripeti Paine stands in the club’s ruined premises. The clubroom still has trophies on the wall, but has otherwise been stripped – gone are the lounge suites, the board games, the decades of paperwork and photographs. Paine is the manager for Age Concern Wairoa, and this was the organisation’s premises. “Completely destroyed,” she says. “Once you start interfering with our whēnua [land], it will lead to the problems that we’re now seeing,” she says.

• The Wairoa Bowling Club

“Where we live … you see all the milling and logging going on out there. When they leave, you can see how the land has been left barren. They have destabilised the whēnua.

“We’re left sitting here in the mud, really.”

Sitting by the green, she says that she hopes those who are displaced by the storm will return.

“I would share this: Hokia ki o maunga, kia purea koe i nga hau a Tawhirimatea.” She wipes tears from her eyes. “Return to your sacred mountain, your spiritual birthplace, and allow the gentle winds to rejuvenate you for the road ahead.”