Flooding in Kāwhia – trees down and slips on roads

Kawhia was cut off early on Monday with reports of flooding at Ōpārau.

While many residential customers were without power, Waipa Networks installed two generators in town on Monday afternoon to ensure power was maintained in the CBD, including for police, fire and businesses.

“We are aware we have parts of our network that are more vulnerable from an environmental perspective and obviously subjected to more frequent and often,” Waipa Networks head of community and customer engagement Anna Greenhill said.    

“Kawhia, being coastal, the conversation was around the slips and the roads and the access. We could find ourselves in a position with Kawhia where it could experience an outage and us not being able to get to that.

“There is a very important community to us out there and that was where we started to look at what was a practical way to support them.

“We can’t put all of them on a generator, they are well dispersed out there, but we can certainly keep all the essential services going, which is what we have managed to do.  

“So that has absolutely paid off.

“We are really pleased to see that worked so well.”

Restoration teams were in Kāwhia on Tuesday, restoring power to the residential customers.

Mid-morning on Tuesday, a large number of Kāwhia residents were without power or cell coverage.

The lines company reported about 3000 customers were without power. Key areas affected were Mokauiti, Ōtewā, Maihiihi, Arohena, Mōkai, Ōwhango and Tūrangi.

Dave Simes, local controller of emergency operations centre at the Ōtorohanga District Council offices, said there was a fair bit of flooding at Ōpārau and on the road into Kāwhia.

“I guess with regard to Ōpārau and Kāwhia, there is road access though they [Waka Kotahi works team] are still clearing debris, tree falls, some slips to that area. There is ongoing work there.”

Early morning high tides had a lot to do with the flooding, he said.

“Our focus is around a longer-term welfare point of view. If there are any longer-term outages, how do we support those communities or individuals? That has been our priority through this.”

Ruapehu Civil Defence stated there were no significant issues reported from around the district from the impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle overnight on Monday.

People are urged to stay well clear of any downed power lines and treat them as if they were live, following a report of downed power lines at Owhango on Tuesday.

While the need was not apparent in the King Country, the country’s third National State of Emergency was declared Monday morning by recently appointed Minister for emergency management Keiran McAnulty.

He said the national declaration did not automatically trigger a change to Civil Defence response arrangements at a local and regional level but allowed strategic coordination of national resources to be used where needed.

The declaration applied to the six regions that had already declared a local State of Emergency: Northland, Auckland, Tairāwhiti, Bay of Plenty, Waikato, and Hawkes Bay.  

“This declaration will enable the Government to support the affected regions, provide additional resources as they are needed, and help set the priorities across the country for the response,” he said.