Hawke's Bay farmer Selwyn Dorward checking his water guage, which registered 30mm of rain since it started falling on Monday. Photo / Warren Buckland
Hawke's Bay farmer Selwyn Dorward checking his water guage, which registered 30mm of rain since it started falling on Monday. Photo / Warren Buckland
Liquid gold.
By noon on Tuesday, Taihape Rd farmer Selwyn Dorward had measured 30 millimetres of rain on the farm not touched by a drop for a month. And it kept falling.
Rainfall varied greatly across the region in the 32 hours from 9am Monday to 5pm Tuesday, with thehighest reading of 154mm recorded near Te Haroto.
Wairoa received about 51mm and Napier 31.8mm, while Waipawa had about 20mm.
Before Tuesday, Dorward's paddocks had browned off, his fields had started to crack in the dry. The downpour will help his 300 hectares, on which he farms mostly bulls and a few sheep.
He said he's used to Hawke's Bay being dry at this time of year.
"That's the landscape that we deal with and farm on," he said.
"Generally speaking we'll get some more rain in March and it will set us up for a good autumn.
"People are conscious of the fact that it's wasn't that long ago that things were really drastic with the drought, but all in all we've had a pretty good summer," he said.
Dorward added that the usefulness of this most recent downpour all depends on what the follow-up will be in the next month.
"February and March can be two of our hottest months," he said.
MetService had issued a rain warning for Hawke's Bay and Gisborne from 8pm Monday, which was valid through to 11pm on Tuesday night.
Between 100 and 160mm of rain was forecast to fall in that time. MetService meteorologist Andy Best said the largest accumulations would be around the ranges.
At the start of February farmland looked dry on the outskirts of Hastings. Photo / Warren Buckland
More than 200 Unison customers were without power for nearly 12 hours in Waimarama and Ocean Beach after an unplanned outage that was caused by the heavy rainfall on Monday night.
The outage happened at 5.43am on Tuesday and power wasn't fully restored until mid-afternoon.
Best said the rain won't be clearing until Wednesday afternoon for most places in Hawke's Bay and it will stay cloudy.
There was also a strong wind watch in place for the region, with southerlies rising to gale strength, gusting around 100km/h. The watch was in place until 8am Wednesday morning.
The southerlies are set to be strong on Wednesday at first, with periods of rain clearing in the afternoon for Hastings, Napier, Waipukurau and Wairoa.
