Tolaga Bay hills cop brunt of record rain

MUDDY GOING: Jared Faber took this shot at the start of Mangatokerau Road north of Tolaga Bay. A family living in a property on the road was airflifted off the roof of their house after the area was hit by severe flooding. Picture supplied

The heavens opened up and unleashed a record deluge on the hills behind Tolaga Bay in the early hours of Monday morning.

At the height of the torrential downpour, the District Council’s rain gauges recorded almost 150 millimetres in just three hours in the Pakarae/Pukerewa stations area on Panikau Road.

The total rainfall recorded in that location came to 235mm over the period from midnight on Sunday night to mid-Monday morning.

In the early hours yesterday, the rain hammered down in that one spot to reach a peak of 55mm in just one hour.

Then it eased right off for about an hour, but returned with a vengeance to produce another 45mm in the next hour and another peak just short of 55mm the following hour.

Records show that the rain-laden front dumped almost twice the whole month’s average rainfall for Pakarae in less than half a day.

Council records also show that the level of the Hikuwai River shot up 10 metres in the space of hours to reach a peak of almost 12 metres.

That is as much as has ever been recorded at the gauge at Willowflat Bridge, even during Cyclone Bola and other past floods.

The Hikuwai’s peak of 11.9m was reached at 8.15 yesterday morning, and the flood surge carried with it masses of forestry debris.

The intense rain cell that burst over the hills inland of Tolaga Bay swamped the Mangatuna area and highway, but fortunately was not repeated elsewhere in the district.

Rainfall figures from the Whareratas to the top of East Cape show much smaller amounts ranging from 40 to 60mm or so. Pouawa, on the Coast, copped the only other big downpour at 134mm for the period.

The past couple of days have brought wildly varying amounts of rain around the district, but the rain over northern Tolaga Bay was the heaviest, totalling more than 300mm up to 7am today.

Pakarae had 257mm in just 24 hours yesterday.

The council’s rain gauge at Mata River recorded the next-heaviest fall for yesterday at 223mm, while Pouawa had 161mm.

Fernside Station had 111mm yesterday and over 180mm up to 7am this morning, while elsewhere in the district rain totals varied from as little as 30mm to over 100mm.

Gisborne firefighters were called to help residents of a house in Moana Road near the former Chalet Rendezvous early yesterday after some domestic flooding. “The low-lying home had water up to the knees through the ground floor,” a senior firefighter said.