Not unexpectedly, the Far North's volunteer firefighters once again demonstrated their total commitment and professionalism. For the first two days Kaitaia crews were being dispatched directly from one emergency to another, to the point where reinforcements were called from Kamo and the Bay of Islands to give them some brief respite. Even when calls kept coming during Thursday's lull in the weather, more than a few of them hardly counting as emergencies, they responded with the same speed and enthusiasm they showed when the storm arrived on Tuesday.
Hats off too to those who serve their community with similar generosity by allowing their employees to man the appliances. A protracted incident like last week's storm must cost them dearly, but without them there would be no brigade. And without the brigade the damage and potential for loss of life would have been much greater.
Less visible were the Top Energy crews that by Tuesday afternoon faced an overwhelming situation. So widespread, so comprehensive was the damage that cut electricity to close to 12,000 of its customers that it would not be much exaggeration to say that no one was quite sure where to start. From the beginning the company made it clear that there would be no quick fix, that the big repair jobs would have to be done before the local lines could be attended to, meaning that some people would be in the dark for days, and that as calamitous as the situation was, every precaution had to be taken to protect the well-being of the crews.
That put the company in an invidious position. On Thursday CEO Russell Shaw was saying that 75 per cent of Top Energy's 10,000 customers in the (far) Far North had lost their electricity, and some were unlikely to be re-connected for up to two days. In the event it was an even longer wait for some, including those who own the lines that connect to their houses from the nearest road.
The first priority was to restore the main feeder lines that deliver electricity to substations around the district, followed by the distribution lines and finally the smaller lines and individual faults. That was a massive job, made even more difficult by access problems - at one point 280 Far North roads were closed or passable only with caution, while getting Top Energy crews and their equipment to some off-road sites presented even greater challenges. And all the while the wind continued to howl, generally accompanied by rain that ranged from steady to torrential, and was always driving.
It was the strength of the wind and the duration of the storm that will long be remembered. Weather such as this tends to skip over the Far North relatively quickly, but this storm stayed, and stayed. And while Top Energy, the Far North District Council, Northland Regional Council and emergency services were bracing themselves for a fresh burst on Friday night (which hammered the Mid North/Bay of Islands but mercifully missed Kaitaia and points north), forecasters were also predicting yet another dose yesterday.
Until Sunday there was a very real prospect that the weather would not finally ease until well into this week, and that all the repair work done over the previous four or five days would be undone.
Russell Shaw described the damage done to his company's infrastructure as immense. His immediate response was expressed in two words - "We're gutted." Mr Shaw's tenure at Top Energy has been marked by a major investment in securing supply, and thereby reducing outages, in a part of the country where geography and climate do not make delivering electricity easy, and the outage statistics that will be recorded for posterity in next year's annual report will be galling to him. Yet he found the grace to compliment his customers for their stoic response to a perhaps unprecedented situation. Customers across the Far North had been terrific, he said, hugely patient and immensely understanding. They needed to know, he added, that everyone at Top Energy, including the 75 field staff, were working tirelessly, within the limits of safety, to restore every last connection.
Certainly this newspaper is not aware of any but a very small number of disgruntled customers. Most of those who could only wait for power to be restored so they could milk their cows (some dairy farmers were coaxing calves back on to their mothers while the crisis ran its course) or who wondered how long it would be before the contents of their freezers began to spoil seemed to accept that everything that could be done was being done.
Despite everything, the Far North did not seem to lose its optimism or collective sense of humour (although it is not especially hilarious to sit in the dark pondering how one might begin putting a newspaper together). This extraordinary weather event will have cost a lot of people a lot of money. It has delivered tragedy on some. It might easily have delivered tragedy on many more. But as Civil Defence spokesman Graeme MacDonald said on Sunday, it gave Northlanders the chance to display their resilience. Whether they hunkered down to ride out the storm, whether they stuck to their jobs come hell or (often literally) high water, whether they went to the service of others or simply did what they could for others less fortunate, like those who gathered up contributions of food to cook hangi for those at Te Hapua who could not cook for themselves, the Far North weathered the storm.
And there were more than a few who began making comparisons with others who have found themselves at nature's mercy in the past, and counted their blessings. Imagine, one said, as she sat in her pitch dark living room with a pot of soup heating on the potbelly, what it must be like after an earthquake.
