The wind began to switch

There was a storm on Tuesday night. There’s nothing unusual about that, apart from the fact we had no idea it was coming. The wind was fierce, often driving a hard rain. It was bad enough that I talked about it on Facebook:

Well, THAT was wild weather last night!! It started raining in the evening, and got more steady and often heavier as the night went on. After midnight (I don't know what time, because I was asleep), the winds began—house rattling and moving winds, "someone's going to lose a roof tonight" winds, even "are we safe?" winds.

The wind woke us up about 4am, and it was too loud -- and, frankly, too scary -- to sleep. We got up about 4:15, and saw the next door neighbours were up, too. Sometime after 5, I went back to bed and managed to sleep.

The wind and rain continued into the morning, then around 10, it all just stopped—no gradual dying down, more like someone threw a switch.

I had a quick look around, and there doesn't seem to be any damage, and no real surface flooding. I wouldn't have guessed that because it SOUNDED so much worse than the weather bomb or ex tropical cyclones we've been hit by over the last few weeks.

Last night, I was really annoyed that the App that's supposed to warn of hazards (including storms) never did. Maybe that's because it was all sound and fury amounting to nothing? No, the new "Hazard" App is terrible, and nowhere near as good as the old Civil Defence App it replaced. There SHOULD have been a warning about damaging winds.

It was the not knowing that kept us from being able to go back to sleep. That, and all the noise from the wild weather last night.

A friend later pointed out on Facebook that there have been other storms that hit with no warning. That’s true, and when combined with the number of times they’ve predicted bad storms that never happened (or weren’t as bad as predicted), it’s little wonder that most Kiwis take weather predictions with a grain of salt.

I actually have a lot of sympathy for them. Being an island nation, the weather for New Zealand is notoriously hard to predict. Even so, it would have been nice to have advance warning or, if that wasn’t possible, at least a warning through the Hazard App.

Yesterday was pretty quiet, really, but this morning the winds picked up again and were sometimes incredibly strong, though not as bad as they were on Tuesday night. Or, did the daylight just make it seem better?

As my mother always used to say, “Whether it rains, or whether is snows, we shall have weather, whether or no.”