Real life Six months on
As they waited for Cyclone Gabrielle to hit, Nick and Corinne Hayward weren’t overly worried. During the nearly eight years they had lived at Karekare, on Auckland’s west coast, they had weathered a few storms and always felt safe in their house up among the trees at the top of a valley.
“And at first, that evening was very calm,” recalls Corinne. “There was no wind or rain – nothing.”
Once their children Onyx, three, and one-year-old Riggs were in bed, the wind began to pick up and the rain got heavier, then torrential. “It felt like you could walk out onto the deck and swim into the sky,”
