Storm damage

For the first time ever, we received damage from a winter storm. The photo above (taken by our neighbour) shows the tree that was blown onto our house during last night’s storm. The guttering is obviously damaged, and the roof looks like it may be, too, but we won’t know the true extent until it’s assessed. With the huge number of insurance claims today, this could take awhile.

The storm that hit the upper North Island last night deluged the region with rain (180mm in some areas, which is about 7 US inches) and swept it with hurricane force winds (gusts of 180kph—about 112 mph in US measure) were recorded.

Emergency services took more than 2500 calls in the Northern District between noon and 10pm yesterday, an extremely heavy volume. Many local governments in the storm’s path activated their Civil Defence protocols.

Yesterday evening, ferry service on Auckland Harbour was cancelled, as was some train service (the latter mostly due to flooding). Motorcycles were banned from the Auckland Harbour Bridge after two cyclists were blown off their motorbikes. And power was knocked out to a large part of the area, including 90,000 homes and the Auckland Harbour Bridge (but not us—our power stayed on). Flooding was common.

And is all that weren’t enough, some lowlifes decided to exploit the situation by robbing blacked-out businesses.

We didn’t realise the tree in our back garden had been knocked over until this morning when we opened the curtains. We heard water flowing out of the gutter, but thought that the gutter was overflowing due to heavy rain; we had no idea that it was wrecked.

The latest forecast says the worst of the bad weather is over, which means the clean-up can begin. Apart from the tree, for us this mostly meant leaves and twigs blown onto our section (which was a bigger clean-up job than that sounds like), though the mesh from someone’s gutters landed in our yard. Actually, that could be from our wrecked gutter for all I know—it’s not like I’ve climbed up there and had a look.

Latest report says the loss assessor will assess tomorrow. Or Friday. Not surprisingly, they’re very busy.

Update: The event that hit the upper North Island on Tuesday has now been designated a weather bomb, and has been described as a "one 150 year event". Good thing, like the Bushies have said, there's no such thing as climate change, eh? If there was, we'd be hearing phrases like that all the time—oh, wait: We are hearing thos phrases all the time. Hm...