Last month, Cyclone Gabrielle smashed into New Zealand's North Island - killing 11 people and displacing at least 10,000 more. It's triggered a national debate about climate change and whether vulnerable homes should be rebuilt or written off.
"I don't want to go back there," said Amy Bowkett.
The mother of two lived in the Hawkes Bay area, one of the regions worst hit by Cyclone Gabrielle. When the Category 3 storm hit with wind speeds of up to 159km/h (99mph), her home was completely destroyed.
Along with 50 of her neighbours she spent a terrifying 48 hours trapped without power, water or phone signal.
Eventually she was able to make a call and a friend organised a helicopter rescue from a neighbour's backyard.
I feel like if we get flooded a third time, it would be our fault," she told the BBC from her mother's home in the nearby city of Napier. "Unless we put our house on stilts, I'd be terrified every time it rained."
"[When] people are sleeping with lifejackets by the door, you know it's bad," said displaced West Auckland resident Morgan Allen. "The anxiety has reached peak levels."
Alongside a group of dozens of Auckland flood victims, Morgan has launched a campaign calling on the government to buy out their homes and turn the high-risk areas into parks or nature reserves. The audio engineer says some of his neighbours spent a year rebuilding their homes only to lose everything again in January.
Morgan blames climate change for recent events, but also tightly packed housing developments - where rows of homes have been built on concrete, replacing single homes on grass areas.
"Our city has lost a huge amount of capacity to sponge up all of this water." He said this had increased the flood risk for homes built near valleys and wetlands.
Consequently, in the days after the cyclone and the Auckland floods, the government announced a NZD$300m ($185m) package for affected regions.
It also introduced new Severe Weather Emergency legislation, designed to help rural landowners fix their properties and rebuild, without the usual red tape.
The impact for the food-growing regions of New Zealand has also been significant. In just one sector, half of the Kumara crop, a type of sweet potato found in New Zealand, was wiped out.
Just down the road from Amy Bowkett in the small rural community of Puketapu were two orchards owned by Brydon Nisbet, blooming with apple trees ready to harvest.
When the cyclone hit, the infrastructure designed to stop the main rivers from flooding collapsed, completely burying his orchard in mud and potentially toxic silt.
"It was just a disaster zone and pretty shocking really," said Brydon, who couldn't reach his property until three days after the disaster. "Everything was ruined. The water went up around three to four metres in the house."
Brydon, who represents fruit growers in Hawkes Bay, estimates up to half of the region's fruit orchards have been hit, some of them totally wiped out. Farmers are desperate to salvage what they can.
"We're all pretty resilient. I've still had plenty of cries and hugs with my wife and different people. But we need to remain positive and have hope.
"When we made the decision to try and save this orchard, that actually brought hope," he said.
"We thought, we want these trees to bloom again, we don't want them to die."