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Three more schools have been closed by flooding in Hawkes Bay today.
Tikokino Principal Damien Kinsey says there is no flooding at the school, but slips and debris on State Highway 50 have meant most of the school's 63 pupils were not able to make it to class.
The other schools to close are Onga Onga and Sherwood.
The area is experiencing heavy rain for the second day in a row, after flash flooding yesterday closed schools and businesses and forced the evacuation of homes.
Metservice is forecasting a further 120mm today and the rain will continue into the weekend, said forecaster Oliver Druce.
Hastings Civil Defence said rain had eased off overnight, but had started to fall again about 4am.
"Some places will have had 300mms in 48 hours," Mr Druce said.
Being on the coast and with a mountain range behind them, it's more unusual for Napier not to have had a decent downfall, he said.
"There will be quite a lot more rain but no really big dumps. Not the 50mms that fell in two hours in Napier yesterday," Mr Druce said.
Transit contractors started out before dawn this morning to check two bridges that were under water yesterday on State Highway 50 that links Napier and Takapau.
The road remains closed while contractors check the structure of the bridges after they got a battering by large logs coming down the stream, said Transit's Hawkes Bay regional manager Gordon Hart.
The deluge yesterday left some areas under more than a metre of water.
Five schools and homes in the worst-affected areas were evacuated after 75mm of rain fell in three hours, cutting off roads, submerging bridges and threatening buildings.
The deluge happened in the morning and downpours continued throughout the day, and the MetService issued a further heavy rain warning last night. "My intensity levels just rose a little bit when I read the weather forecast," Hastings Civil Defence incident controller Mike Maguire told the Herald.
More than 150mm of rain had already fallen in the 24 hours to 4pm, and Mr Maguire said Civil Defence staff would continue to closely monitor the situation through the night from an emergency headquarters set up at the Hastings District Council. "Our concern is that we could have intensities of rainfall up to 20 to 30mm per hour." The rural settlement of Maraekakaho and the Hastings suburb of Flaxmere were among the areas swamped yesterday.
Flaxmere's community centre, library and Waterworld swimming complex were closed for a period after rising waters blocked roads. Flooding and a 500m slip covered Kereru Rd, leading to Maraekakaho, while two submerged bridges closed State Highway 50 in the nearby Tikokino area.
Transit NZ was due to inspect the bridges this morning and they were to remain closed until any structural damage was repaired. Emergency services urged people to avoid non-essential travel throughout the region. Army Unimog trucks evacuated children from Maraekakaho School, 23km west of Hastings, and Puketapu School, 14km west of Napier.
Puketapu teacher Rosemary Smith said more than a metre of water had flooded parts of the school grounds. "We just had a real deluge between 8.30am and 9am and it came up extremely quickly," she said.
"It's fairly much one of those bomb-type situations where there's been a lot of water in a very short time." She said the road leading to the school, the staff carpark and a playground were under water when the decision to evacuate pupils was made.
"The water was flowing through before we could even get them [the cars] out," Ms Smith said.
Two Unimogs ferried the school's 230 students to the Puketapu Hotel, the children considering it "a great adventure". But not so for their parents, who were asked to get to the hotel to collect them after floodwaters made bus routes impassable.
The school serves a large rural area with farms, orchards and vineyards, and staff had received reports of families cut off and one with a flooded home. Ms Smith said the flood was the first in the area in a long time.
At Maraekakaho, five houses as well as the school were evacuated. The decision to evacuate pupils was made at 10am. Hukerere College, Moteo Kohanga Reo and Elsthorpe School also carried out evacuations.
