From the driver’s seat of his Hilux, farmer Dave Kelly surveys his land. Or, more precisely, an empty space where several million cubic metres of his land used to be.
‘‘I think it’s just about as big as a landslide gets in an earthquake,’’ he says. No one else in the ute has a geology degree, but it’s hard to imagine a slip on a larger scale. On November 14, 2016, a magnitude-7.8 earthquake tore through Kelly’s farm in the Leader Valley in North Canterbury, just east of its epicentre near Waiau, triggering numerous landslides and opening up myriad fissures in the ground.
The slip we are looking at dwarfs everything else around it. What looks like about half of an enormous hill now sits in an equally enormous pile on the valley floor and a sheer, gaping face of earth now stands exposed. The slip material dammed the Leader River, which flows through Kelly’s farm. The kilometre-long backlog of water was quickly christened ‘Lake Rebekah’, after Kelly’s wife.
The lake became an overnight sensation, garnering plenty of attention from the media and watersports enthusiasts.
The shores of Lake Rebekah have receded since November last year. Most of it happened all at once in February when the dam burst, dropping the lake level by nearly four metres.
The water now flows over a terrace and cascades down several metres to resume its journey as the Leader River once more. A return of sorts to what used to be, but will never truly be again.