Region prepared as rain keeps coming

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Heavy rain continues to threaten a sodden Tairāwhiti and its rain-weary residents, although the risks from this latest severe weather look to have peaked on Thursday afternoon.

Ongoing wet weather developed into a 24-hour deluge from Wednesday evening that saw rivers rise to danger levels and communities cut off as our highways and dozens of local roads were closed by flooding and landslides.

Te Karaka residents were urged to leave their homes from early afternoon as the Waipaoa rose past the 7.5m threshold for evacuation — later nearing 9.5m and breaching its banks south of the township that was inundated during Cyclone Gabrielle.

Mid-afternoon on Thursday MetService upgraded a heavy rain warning already in place through to midday on Sunday to its highest red warning level, and a seven-day State of Emergency was declared by the Mayor at 4.45pm.

Welfare centres have been set up around the region and community emergency response teams have mobilised. Extra police, St John, Fire and Emergency NZ and medical staff have been arriving to bolster the regional response to the ongoing severe weather.

Residents were urged to delay unnecessary travel on our fragile road network, and to have enough food and medicine for three days if they live in an area that can be isolated. The message for anyone living close to a river who is concerned at any time is that they should self-evacuate and not wait for an official notice.

We remain under a red warning for heavy rain through to midday on Sunday but the outlook did improve a little yesterday — basically because so much rain had already fallen — alongside a weather reprieve that saw river levels steadily reducing throughout much of the day.

Residents were hunkering down ahead of another night of heavy rain as we completed this newspaper in the early evening yesterday. Friday’s edition was the first one that had to be flown in since we moved to printing in Auckland in early May; today’s newspaper was also being flown in from Rotorua, as SH2 from Matawai to Whatatutu remained closed apart from scheduled convoys yesterday afternoon, and with more rain threatening further issues.

It has been a tough year for us all on the weather front and many of our communities, people and businesses have been severely affected, with major ongoing impacts.

These severe weather events and their aftermath have been incredibly taxing on the amazing people who look after their communities in these situations too, and everyone will be thinking of them also as they play their vital roles once again.