Auckland floods, Cyclone Gabrielle, and a year of extreme weather - The Front Page

A landslide in Shore Road, Remuera caused neighbouring homes to be red-stickered after the Auckland Anniversary floods. Photo / Brett Phibbs

2023 was a year dominated by extreme weather.

In late January at the start of Auckland’s Anniversary Day weekend, heavy rain in the city quickly turned into a regional disaster that caught everyone by surprise.

It was pegged as a once-in-a-century event - but barely a fortnight later, Cyclone Gabrielle swept down the upper North Island, bringing destruction with it to parts of Northland and coastal Auckland, but hitting the East Coast the hardest.

For The Front Page, the Herald’s daily news podcast, these were some of the biggest episodes for the show in 2023r. But as we head into a new year, the destruction wrought by these storms is easy for those unaffected to forget, allowing the lessons we should learn from them to fade from memory.

In today’s episode, we’re revisiting these extreme weather events, starting with senior newsroom leader Hamish Fletcher, who was working both the night of Auckland’s floods and during Cyclone Gabrielle, to detail how both weather events unfolded and the damage they inflicted on the country.

Then we hear from Hawke’s Bay Today editor Chris Hyde, who spoke with the podcast in August to mark six months since Gabrielle and detail how the clean-up process has gone, and why the region is keen on tourists to visit the areas unaffected by the cyclone.

While these storms and their destruction are always a concern, it’s through situations like these that opportunities to adapt and change also present themselves.

And finally, Dr Timothy Welch, a senior lecturer in urban planning at the University of Auckland, joined the podcast in the immediate aftermath of the storms to discuss how we can limit the impact of climate change on our major cities.

The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. New episodes return on January 15th.

It is presented by Damien Venuto, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in business reporting who joined the Herald in 2017.

You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.