Our Pony Club needs your help

On the 5th January, the tropical storm continues to bombard the country. Strong winds and heavy rain; we thought little of it. Otumoetai Pony Club Grounds (a club of the Tauranga Pony Club branch) owns their own grounds beside the Wairoa River. The worst storm surge in over 50 years caused us to lose everything.

A call went out to our Pony Club's Facebook group asking if anybody could check on the horses that were grazing there because the grounds were flooding a little, nothing uncommon for our little low lying club. When people responded, within 20 minutes of the post going out, the horses were knee deep in water (just under 90cm). Instead of moving the horses to a different paddock, which was on higher ground. We decided to evacuate them. Once bolt cutters had arrived (another 20 minutes), the horses were chest deep in raging waters. A smaller pony (12.2hh) was swimming as he couldn't keep himself afloat in the wild waters. Within the 1 hour, the 'small flooding' (about 20cm) had turned into a 1m + raging current (basically an extension of the river).

Without the fast response of our members, we would have lost 8 horses lives. All the horses are safe but not uninjured. We had one that needed to stay 2 nights at Matamata vets to assess a swollen hind leg, and the 7 others have muscle damage due to the amount of swimming they had to endure in their rescue. We are all so so lucky.

At our grounds, we have 3 storage sheds, one for our mowers and petrol, one for gear and one for feed. All 3 were not watertight. The petrol cans stored in our big shed were tipped over and fuel and oil was leaked all over our Pony Club grounds, through all of our grazers tack, feed and our soil. Our new jumps and 20 X 60 pipe arena were washed downstream into the sewage drains. The salt in the sea water is also of concern, for it would have damaged our soil. Our fences and all our cross country jumps were also destroyed.

The reason for the catastrophic flooding was our stock bank burst in 3 places. No matter how much rain we get, this level of flooding has never been seen before.

We have lost a lot. Our kids are busy planning fundraising days to try to cover any legal costs and vet bills for our grazers (look out Tauranga Equatrian community for show

Jumping days). It would mean the world to our club to receive any help people can offer us, no matter how small everything will help our club clean up the grounds we love so much.