The violent El Niño tornado that tore through a Christchurch suburb

Friday, 3 July 2026

Workmen struggle to sort out the damage in a Halswell Junction Rd flat that lost its roof and had its walls smashed by the freak wind in January 1983.

ANALYSIS: John Wilson had just put his two daughters, aged 6 and 4, to bed when the wind began shaking their Halswell Junction Rd house on the outskirts of Christchurch.

“I dashed upstairs and grabbed the two girls from their beds and had just got out of the room when the wall crashed in where they had been lying,” the builder told a reporter from The Press.

“I had to go back up the stairs to get my young son. As I came back down I could hear the door splintering behind me. We had to hide under the table downstairs to save ourselves. It was so terrifying.”

It was just after 8pm on Wednesday, January 19, 1983, when the Halswell tornado struck.

An aerial view of houses in Halswell that were severely damaged in the 1983 storm.

“It happened so quickly,” Ella Williams said from her wrecked flat just down the road.

“The windows in the lounge were blown in and the furniture was thrown over. I managed to get over to the oven to turn it off. The brandy crisps are still in there if you feel like one,” she said to the reporter.

Worst hit were residents of Kinrara Place, where almost every house and structure was damaged. Broken glass, tiles and building debris covered the road.

Several locals were injured and an elderly Halswell resident died from an apparent heart attack when the tornado roared through the suburb.

The tornado and its 3cm diameter hailstones came at the peak of the strongest El Niño in the past 50 years, which began in the winter of 1982 and lasted until April the following year, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

New Zealand’s summer of 1982-83 was dominated by unsettled and cold southwesterlies, which were often stormy, especially in the south.

Damage to homes in Halswell after the January 1983 tornado.

While El Niño’s usual signal of drier than average conditions was present for much of the country, the South Island’s West Coast and places south of Dunedin experienced a very cold and wet season. Frequent squally sou’west changes making their way north up the South Island’s east coast brought more than a dozen thunderstorms and several destructive hailstorms to Canterbury in December and January.

The Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), which measures the air-pressure difference between Tahiti and Darwin, expresses the intensity of any El Niño or its opposite, La Niña. By February 1983 it had dropped to -33.3, the lowest monthly value since 1905.

People clear up damage after the tornado.

We’ve been hearing a lot about El Niño in recent weeks. Another El Niño was declared on Thursday, with 30-day SOI values heading towards -20, and there is justifiable concern about the chaos it will bring to global weather patterns and how it will affect food production and trigger environmental disasters.

El Niño is driven by changes in sea temperature across the Pacific Ocean, which in turn affects circulation patterns in the atmosphere. The classic El Niño signal on a map is a tongue of warmer than normal water stretching from near the Peru and Ecuador coast west along the Equator.

A tarpaulin is spread across the shattered roof of a Halswell Junction Rd house,.

However, there is no such thing as a “normal” El Niño. In New Zealand, as elsewhere, the weather we receive during one is influenced by other large-scale drivers, such as the Indian Ocean Dipole and the Southern Annular Mode.

There can also be other factors. The cold and changeable 1982-83 El Niño here came after the March 1982 eruption of Mexico’s El Chichon volcano, which pumped about 7 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide directly into the stratosphere. This gas acted like a mirror, reflecting incoming heat from the Sun and dropping global average temperatures by 0.3°C.

It’s important to point out I’m not forecasting this is how this year’s El Niño may unfold, but rather providing an example of how each event has its own characteristics.

Next time we’ll look at the super El Niño of 1997-98 and how it couldn’t have been more different than the one in 1982-83.