"TANGOIO, New Zealand — The wharenui, or meeting house, stood forlorn. Usually the hub of this remote Maori community, it had been stripped of its wooden carvings. The bare cinder block shell gave the building an unclothed appearance. Wind whistled through holes bashed out by floodwaters.
An official red notice prohibited entry to the adjacent dining hall, where the walls were askew, jammed with twigs and debris. The preschool was shuttered, the children gone. Down the valley, dump trucks whirred as they hauled silt from ruined fields.
Eight months have passed since a powerful cyclone struck northern New Zealand, killing 11 people and displacing more than 10,000. The storm’s path across the Hawke’s Bay region was indiscriminate: It pummeled low-rent housing alongside million-dollar homes, wineries, orchards and factories. But the barriers to recovery here highlight the double whammy dealt to Indigenous communities by climate change, as extreme weather events exacerbate already high rates of homelessness and economic disadvantage."
Rachel Pannett reports for the Washington Post October 27, 2023.
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