‘We crawled though mud screaming their names’

The whānau have lost their house, cars and possessions and their pets are still missing.

They had spent the last two years renovating their cherished family home, in Tauranga, south-east of Auckland, completing the building work the day before the landslide.

Now the house lies crumpled in the middle of the road like a flattened cardboard doll’s house.

Both their vehicles were destroyed – one was crushed and one was launched though the wall of the house by the force of the slip, ending up in the kitchen.

Heavy downpours, which began in the Bay of Plenty area on January 27, increased on Saturday, causing multiple slips in the region. The worst was a landslide of a bank in Maungatapu, in which the force of the falling mud, trees and rocks, crushed two houses and damaged more.

Teresa Hodgson is still shaking the day after her home was crushed in the middle of the night.

She, her partner Luke Hanan, and their youngest child Bailee, nine, were asleep in their rooms. The couple’s four older children – Mason, Morgan, Blake and Natalie, were still awake “doing their thing” around the house, gaming, playing on their phones and watching movies.

Hodgson and Hanan were jolted from their slumbers by a booming sound. Everything was shaking violently around them.

Hanan thought they must be in the middle of a massive earthquake.

“The house was shaking with such force we thought it was an earthquake. I’d been in the Edgecumbe earthquake, but this felt 30 times stronger. I yelled to Teresa, let’s get the kids and get out,” he said.

When the couple opened the door from their bedroom, they were immediately disorientated. It was pitch black as the power had gone out. The floor was covered in mud, debris, glass and bits of branches.

Hodgson managed to reach her daughter’s bedroom. But when she got to the door where her youngest child had been sleeping, she was stunned in horror that she was not there. Neither was the bedroom.

“Her whole bedroom had disappeared, it just wasn’t there at all. It was only then I lost it and started screaming. I thought the bedroom must have been crushed to the ground with Bailee under it,” Hodgson said.

The whole structure of the house had changed and was unrecognisable. Corridors and stairs had disappeared or were in other places.

“We were crawling through mud and glass shouting the kids’ names. It was pitch back. The house was still moving. We thought they were buried under the mud, dead,” Hanan said.

“We were still thinking it was an earthquake. It was only when we got to the back of the house – or what once was the back of the house – I realised that the cliff had come down on us.”

Hysterical and in shock, thinking their children had been killed, the couple then were astonished to suddenly discover the boys bedroom, which had been shunted to a different place on the section.

“There was no sign of the boys, but there was a mattress by an open window, so we were hopeful they had got out that way, and we climbed through it too.”

Covered in mud, the pair stumbled into the road outside, where they could see their neighbours. Hodgson was still distraught, screaming for her daughter.

“Our neighbours ran up to us and said – it’s okay, we have got them. I didn’t believe it until I saw them. When I saw Bailee I collapsed and cried and hugged her,” she said.

“She had been able to make her way into the boys’ room who’d put a mattress over the broken glass to get her out of the window safely to the street. She was a bit cut up and scratched but other than that great. I’m so proud of their ingenuity and for looking after their little sister.”

It was only then that Luke Hanan looked back at their house and saw the devastation.

“That part hasn’t sunk in. We haven’t gone and looked at it today or talked to insurance or council or anything like that. I think we are still in shock and absorbing what we went through because it was so terrifying,” said Hanan.

The family and their five children are now staying with relatives. They have nothing but the clothes they escaped from the house in.

The family were still worried about their two cats Puss Puss, a tabby with white socks, and Rebecca, a long haired black cat, said Hodgson.

“They like to roam in the bush at night so they were unlikely to have been in the house but we couldn’t find them.”

Hodgson said the fact her kids survived, and that they would hopefully be reuinited with their beloved animals too, mattered more than any material thing could match.

“I left in a singlet with no shoes, covered in mud. The kids have no clothes or shoes. We have no house. Yet today we all feel grateful to be alive. That’s all that matters. I don’t need shoes, I need my children. The fact that they are all ok puts everything into perspective.

Teresa Hodgson’s sister, Larissa Hodgson, has set up an online fundraiser to support the family with the trauma of the event and in the weeks that follow as they start to rebuild their lives.