Several hundred feet above the city were views of the damage. The waterlogged Spriggins Park, the flooded underground carpark at Trafalgar Square.
The water was receding slowly on the city side of the Whanganui River but the riverside in the East and its parks were buried. Only the very tops of the Kowhai park playground poked through the surface water.
Heading out to low lying Whangaehu, 16km south of Wanganui was a landscape dotted with lakes and slipped cliffs.
Whangaehu always gets hammered by floods and it had been again. The state highway winds towards the settlement and then disappears. Fences and paddocks had gone with only the tops of houses and trees visible.
Back across the city, north, to another low lying settlement, Waitotara. The 27 kilometres of State Highway 3 which linked it and Wanganui was dead. It was closed, there were no cars, only orange roadblocks placed randomly.
Flooding and slipping near Waitotara on Sunday morning PHOTO/ BEVAN CONLEY
At Waitotara the bridge was still intact but river was close to it. Three people gathered around three vehicles in the middle of a muddied country road. They could go no further.
Like Whangaehu, the flood had claimed homes and buildings in Waitotara.
The floods extended acres around the village. Heading back to the city along the coast, plumes of brown water at each river mouth were spewing into the blue ocean.
