Supplied
Dan and Ashlee Gale with daughters Alison and Peyton and their family home after Cyclone Gabrielle.
A business wiped out in Cyclone Gabrielle is questioning the handling of relief funding applications after being told it didn’t qualify for the maximum $40,000 grant.
Dan and Ashlee Gale own Eskdale Holiday Park in Esk Valley, north of Napier, where they live with young daughters Alison and Peyton.
The Gales ensured their camp was entirely evacuated in the days before the cyclone hit on February 14. The last two people left at 7am that morning, before flooding occurred at midnight.
“We’d stayed there until 10.30pm, when we left and went and stayed with my parents up the hill,” Dan Gale said.
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Their home and the campground facilities and infrastructure were extensively damaged.
Also lost were the camp’s portable office, three cabins, tractors and tools. Ten caravans they owned, which had been moved to Gale’s brothers property because they thought they’d be safe, were trashed too.
MONIQUE FORD/Stuff
The Esk Valley was amongst the worst hit areas in Cyclone Gabrielle. (File photo)
“They’d have been safe there in [Cyclone] Bola. But not Gabrielle,” Gale said.
The family intends to get the business up and running again. That’s likely to take 12 to 18 months.
They expect to incur a loss of turnover of $350,000 to $475,000.
“All up we’re looking at a loss of about $1.5 million, I’d say. That’s excluding the house.”
Chris Skelton/Stuff
Esk Valley in the days after Cyclone Gabrielle. (File photo)
Their home remains full of silt and is uninhabitable.
The house, buildings and contents were insured, but the caravans and loss of business earnings were not covered.
“Ashlee and I worked in the business, so we went from business owners to beneficiaries overnight,” Gale said.
The Gales applied for a grant from the Government’s Cyclone and Flood Response Fund. The fund provides grants of up to $40,000 to help cover immediate cashflow issues and get those affected back on their feet.
CHRIS SKELTON
Chris Barber hugs his brother Philip after the pair were reunited on the thick silt and mud that destroyed Chris’s home when floodwaters swept through Esk Valley near Napier.
Applications for the grants are made to eight agencies in the eight areas affected by Cyclone Gabrielle. In Hawke’s Bay the applications go to the Hawke’s Bay Chamber of Commerce.
”We asked for the full $40,000. We got granted $8000,” Gale said.
“Subsequently, we went back and asked for the full $40,000. They wrote back saying they’d give us $25,000.”
He questioned how other businesses that suffered nothing like the damage they did got the full $40,000 “straight off the bat”.
“There seems to have been more funding gone to business far less affected than ours. It seems like those who got in first got the biggest chunks of money and the only reason they could get in first is because they weren’t that badly affected.
“We didn’t even know about this fund for bloody ages. We know of others who’ve missed out all together.”
The Gales’ experience is similar to that of Maik and Marianne Beekmans, whose property and business in the Esk Valley were also destroyed. The chamber initially declined the Beekmans’ application, then later told them they could get a grant of $15,000 – less than half the $40,000 they’d requested.
The chamber did not respond to a request for comment.
