© Otago Daily Times / Stephen JaquieryDozens of roads have been forced to close, some highways are closed and buses have been cancelled due to flooding and slips battering Dunedin.
Local authorities in the South Island city said more than 80 people who lived in low-lying areas spent the night in emergency shelters after the rain began Thursday. There have been no deaths and no one is unaccounted for.
But the city of 135,000 people was effectively cut off when the main highways leading into and out of Dunedin were closed due to flooding. They were expected to remain closed until Saturday, the City Council said on its website.
Other roads were closed due to landslides. Conditions were unpredictable said local government spokesperson Chris Henderson, who urged residents not to drive unless it was "extremely essential."
A local state of emergency remains in place for the city, which is due to be battered by rain until late Friday.
The forecaster NIWA said 13 centimeters (5 inches) of rain fell on Dunedin between Thursday and Friday morning, nearly two and a half times the October average of 6 centimeters (2.3 inches). It was the wettest day on record since April 1923.
Floods are among New Zealand's most destructive and frequent natural disasters, and extreme weather events have grown more severe and unpredictable. In January 2023, the largest city, Auckland, recorded its wettest month on record after catastrophic floods killed four people and caused nearly 2 billion New Zealand dollars ($1.2 billion) in damage.
Days later, Cyclone Gabrielle — the costliest tropical cyclone on record in the Southern Hemisphere — devastated parts of the North Island, killing 11.
AP
Reader Comments
Trouble is, these days our local authorities are signed up to the 2030 Agenda (UN) and declare "state of emergency" for things we just accepted as normal spring weather for decades.
"Once in a hundred year event" is a term that our MSM uses without the remotest understanding of the meteorological meaning. Its a scale of measurement not a literal term.
The reference to "since 1923" refers to the flooding of that year in Dunedin In other words, the 1923 event was far more extensive and prolonged.
As Toipup1 says in the comment above, "nothing unusual here". And that includes the aforementioned authorities granting permits to build roads and housing on flood plains.
I'll tell you something that a correspondent relayed to me a few years back.
This is purely anecdotal.
He worked for the DSIR (the now-defunct government science department) back in the 80s.
They had done some seismic surveying of Christchurch and apparently found a web of faultlines under the city and suburbs, along with areas of concern for subsidence and liquefaction should there ever be a large seismic event.
One day he turned up at the office and the printed and coded maps were being fed through the shredder.
He was told that the data was unpalatable for future development of the city and besides, "there isn't much chance of a major earthquake in our lifetime".
He was horrified to see new sanitized maps being drawn up.
He asked if he could take one of the original maps before they all got destroyed. No chance mate, they are all numbered and counted.
To corroborate this story, the first year I arrived in NZ we were walking down Colombo Street in the CBD, and my great uncle (a born Kiwi and a mine of local knowledge) told me that the DSIR had mapped Christchurch and found faults running through the city. He asserted tome (I was 15 at the time) that should I stay in Christchurch, I would likely experience a big quake that would do some major damage to the city.
Of course, after the quakes of 2010-2011, all the authorities proclaimed the faults that generated the quakes were "un-mapped".
I laughed. They were correct of course. those faults and areas of geological concern were removed from the maps and thus literally "un-mapped".
Much of the catastrophic damage to Christchurch appears to have been preventable by simple virtue of not building on hazardous ground.
I suspect the negative energy he sensed has much to do with the influence of the CCP in our nation. I stand with the Buddhists and Falun Gong on that matter.
Interesting times ahead.