“It died instantly, frozen solid,” said Barnett. The chickens had retreated to a pear tree from where Lyon and Barnett’s daughter rescued them and were having to warm them back up. “So now I’ve got chickens running around,” said Barnett, a builder. “I can’t keep them in because all the fences are gone. The gardens are gone. The grapevine has been stripped… there’s nothing, just the stalks. It was intense, very intense.” Lyon described rain that poured down from around 5pm for an hour and a half as “freakish” and hitting Putāruru “with a vengeance” with low-lying parts of their three-acre property soon inundated by runoff from nearby farmland.
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