The crowd gets into the spirit of Hawke's Bay's annual New Year's Eve celebration at the Soundshell on Napier's Marine Parade. Photo / John Cowpland / Alphapix
The crowd gets into the spirit of Hawke's Bay's annual New Year's Eve celebration at the Soundshell on Napier's Marine Parade. Photo / John Cowpland / Alphapix
Fireworks are still the boom attraction of New Year’s Eve with a Napier tradition sparking up the waterfront for more than a quarter of a century.
Displays at 9.45pm and midnight lived up to their family-friendly billing – alcohol-free and trouble-free – and were as popular as when public NewYear’s Eve celebrations were revived on the beachfront to welcome in the year 2000.
With an early display added to the programme over the years for the benefit of children heading home early for bed, Napier City Council events manager Kevin Murphy said the displays remain the most popular and cost-effective parts of the council-owned event run in conjunction with local promoters Littlestone.
Thus, fireworks displays were held in numerous centres throughout the country, despite adverse weather, although in Napier it was a warm and idyllic night with a touch of breeze and an ever-present threat of rain.
Boom times as 2025 is farewelled and the New Year welcomed in with fireworks in Napier. Photo / John Cowpland / Alphapix
Bonnie Hurunui from White Chapel Jak, the star act on New Year's Eve at the Napier Soundshell. Photo / John Cowpland / Alphapix
A police team was on hand on Wednesday night in case of trouble of the drunken type that affected New Year’s Eve celebrations in the mid-late 1900s.
Police said there were no significant incidents, even when a custody van, about six other police vehicles and more than a dozen staff arrived in Clive St East soon after 12.30pm.
Police swarm an area of Clive Square East after reports of a fight soon after midnight. Photo / Doug Laing
Onlookers said there had been a fight involving two men and it appeared one was arrested and the police presence was “a job on the way back to base”.
At Mahia, crowd numbers were “nowhere near as big as past years”, according to community constable Chad Prentice.
There was one arrest and a specialist police unit conducted about 800 driver breath tests, almost every vehicle in and out of the peninsula township, without a single failure.
Police said there were 41 New Year’s Eve arrests nationwide, 17 of them in the Tauranga and Western Bay of Plenty area. New Year’s Eve events in some other centres were cancelled because of stormy weather.
A spokesperson for Hato Hone St John told Radio New Zealand the ambulance service responded to 177 incidents nationwide between 10pm and 3am, about 40% down on recent years.
In Hawke’s Bay, attention was soon turning to the possibility of heavy rain during the rest of the holiday period before the return to work for many on Monday.
MetService on Thursday issued a “heavy rain watch” notice, for an area from north of Napier to Gisborne.
The warning was for the 12 hours from noon to midnight on Saturday, with periods of heavy rain and the possibility of thunderstorms dropping 25-40mm of rain per hour.
Doug Laing is a Hawke’s Bay Today reporter with more than 40 years covering news events in the region, including New Year’s Eve celebrations.
