The narrowest of escapes

An elderly Kaitaia woman had what appeared to be a miraculous escape from serious injury or worse when a huge macrocarpa tree toppled on to her house on Tuesday afternoon.

She was pinned in her lounge chair by one leg when the Kaitaia Fire Brigade arrived, deputy Chief Fire Officer Craig Rogers saying that releasing her from inside her extensively damaged house had been an unnerving experience.

Two ceiling joists had come down, he said, one pinning the woman's leg, the other coming to a halt millimetres from her head. Fortunately she had been able to reach her phone to call for help.

Another tree fell, away from the house, while the brigade was there, and a third toppled on to a carport next door.

The woman appeared to have escaped unscathed, Mr Rogers added, but she had been taken to Kaitaia Hospital by ambulance as a precaution.

That was perhaps the worst of the damage done by winds that at times gusted at 160km/h, but the Kaitaia Fire Brigade was kept busy all afternoon and into the night, responding to fallen trees and lifting roofs.

The Firestone building in Kaitaia was one of the worst-affected, the wind lifting sheets of iron and all but demolishing a roller door.

A Moerewa man was lucky his house suffered only minor damage when it was hit by a falling pine tree. Kawakawa CFO Wayne Martin said it was fortunate that the tree's lower branches struck the ground first, absorbing some of the impact, before the top of the tree crashed on to the corrugated iron roof.

Meanwhile by midnight Tuesday the Kaitaia brigade had officially responded to 29 calls, about a standard month's worth, although Mr Rogers said crews had gone from one incident to another without returning to the station, and the actual figure would have been much higher than that. By yesterday morning the figure had officially risen to more than 40, with calls still coming in as residents woke to find roofs damaged and trees down.

Dozens of trees were felled by the wind, and at least 28 roofs were torn off across the region, the Kaitaia district and points north bearing the brunt of the storm.

A fire appliance had to take evasive action to avoid a falling tree at Waiharara, a tree fell on a car on State Highway 10 at Kaingaroa, without causing injury, and other weather-related crashes were reported at Mangamuka and Ngataki, where a tour bus was hit by a falling branch.

Image 1 of 26: Kaitaia resident Helen Cossey took this shot saying, "Thankfully this 40+ year old clothesline was the only casualty at my place in the storm yesterday"