As Hawke's Bay prepares for more bad weather Newshub revisited quieter spots on the outskirts of Napier.
Newshub made it further up State Highway 2 on Friday to see the scale of the job that lies ahead.
North of Napier, the road doesn't take you far with a destroyed bridge at Tangoio and slips lying further ahead. And there's a daunting task ahead even once the critical crossing is re-established.
Back down the valley, we catch one man pulling out of his flood-ravaged land, his family's home for generations.
"Oh it was just horrific. My family are quite brave to go through it all," Tangoio resident Richard Price said.
He and two other family members called to be rescued around 3am on Tuesday, however the help that was needed never came. Miraculously a friend reached them, alive, eight hours later.
Despite all the damage and destruction, they are determined to stay.
"We're just going to carry on, my family before me have been through this before, so we've come back from it before, so you've just got to carry on," Price said.
In Rissington, isolation is encouraging innovation, with locals rebuilding a bridge they lost. Now, local residents are dismantling it as the rain sets in again.
"They've just had to break it open a bit so we can release the water so it's just real important that we get that message out there so we don't have people coming down and thinking they can get across and putting people's lives at risk," Rissington Station owner Jeremy Absolom said.
A new and improved pulley system has been set high above the river to withstand the coming rain. On the other side, those still cut off gratefully unload.
"Just 91 fuel to get to the other side to get to the generators really because the guys on the other side are going through 1300 litres a day," one resident told Newshub.
A sign of practicality in the face of adversity.
"It's a silage feeder, so yeah, you do what you've gotta do in these situations," they said.
But there's a long, long road ahead.
"I wouldn't say under control by any stretch and I think the biggest thing is, you know, real emergency access routes have been cleared but we're a long way from being clean and clear here," said Absolom.
The two things they need most are power and access before attention turns to the future.
"We're all scratching our head as to what to do and having to re-think what it might be like after this," Absolom said.
"There's a whole lot of areas we'll have to build on top of what's there now and not taking it back to what it was before."
Determined to stay - but make no mistake it is a region changed forever.
