'Not again': West Auckland desperate for flood warning system after storm

Tuesday, 22 March 2022

Kumeū needs early warning systems to avoid a repeat of August's destructive floods, local resident Guy Wishart says.

When the rain came bucketing down over Auckland early Monday morning, Rodney Local Board chairman Phelan Pirrie thought to himself: “Not again.”

Auckland and Northland were hit with thunderstorms and flash floods in the early hours of the morning, and Auckland’s “second-wettest hour” ever was recorded at the Albany weather station between 8am and 9am.

Meanwhile, more than 700 lightning strikes occurred in five minutes.

Kumeū business owners use a kayak to ferry goods from a flooded warehouse the day after the August 31 floods last year.

However, the downpour was well below the amount recorded in August, when West Auckland was inundated with localised flash flooding, leaving homes and businesses destroyed when up to 260mm hit the region.

Phelan Pirrie, board chairman of two years and a volunteer firefighter was heavily involved in the emergency response back in August, he had trouble falling asleep when the rain started hitting his roof early Monday morning.

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Pirrie, who is also a volunteer firefighter, was heavily involved in the emergency response.

He said he had trouble sleeping when the rain started hitting his roof early on Monday.

“I knew if the same thing happened as last time, it was going to be bad. It sounded like somebody emptying a bath on the roof for about an hour,” he told Stuff.

Streets flooded in Auckland on Monday following torrential rain.

It prompted him to get back in touch with Auckland Council about the early warning systems he had been petitioning for since last year's floods. He said there had been no movement on the project, which had already dragged on for seven months.

The early warning systems would be similar to the Civil Defence alert system, where a text would be sent to locals in the region in the event of possible flood conditions.

He said a similar procedure was in place at Piha, but Healthy Waters was responsible for providing the data.

“There’s been work done on private property and drain clearing, but I'm not sure that anything's been done for the long term. I've done everything on my end,” Pirrie said.

“We either need to know it isn't possible, in which case we’ll have to understand why, so we can explain to the public, or we need to know that it is possible, so we can put things in place to make it happen.”

Healthy Waters said it was still developing a system to predict barrages of potentially damaging rain.

“Healthy Waters is still developing the technology to use rain radar data for early warning for localised flash flooding, such as that which hit Kumeū in August last year,” general manager Craig Mcilroy said.

“For widespread events like the one Auckland has experienced [this week], we rely on the weather warnings provided by the MetService to prepare.”

Guy Wishart, who was evacuated from his Kumeū home during the floods, said the district got heavy rain in the early hours of Monday morning.

He’d informed locals to move their animals upfield in anticipation for any floodwaters.

The rain was gone by 10am, and Wishart said they’d dodged a bullet. He has been involved in petitioning for the early warning systems, and said the process had dragged on.

“It almost feels like it would be faster if did it ourselves,” he said.