Have we become paranoid over our historically tempestuous weather, asks Alan Titchall, reviewing the drama around the storms in April (2026)
Cyclone Vaianu last month, and the unpredicted weather bomb that then hit the lower North Island, gave us another lesson in the challenge of accurately predicting our maritime weather and our historic vulnerability to weather events.
No disrespect to the regions that suffered storm damage the weekend after Cyclone Vaianu, but we have a much-recorded history of unfavourable weather.
In early April, as Cyclone Vaianu, already downgraded from a category three to a category two, headed towards the North Island, Civil Defence and council alarm bells went berserk. MetService said the weather system would bring a combination of damaging winds, heavy rain, flooding, and coastal inundation, with the potential for more power outages, road closures, and isolated communities. Emergency mobile alerts had us batten down the hatches, empty supermarket shelves, and huddling in fear as councils enforced mandatory evacuations and declared states of emergency.
Well, not the Wairoa District Council. Its Mayor Craig Little and his elected members of the council who chose not to join Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, Napier, Hastings, and Central Hawke’s Bay councils in declaring ‘emergencies’, which he calls the last tool that should be used in the toolbox – not the first.
“We’re becoming woke as a country when it comes to states of emergency,” he said, sharing what a lot of us around the country already think. Wairoa has been through disasters before, he said, and calling a state of emergency before it even hit, simply wasn’t necessary. His district was already well prepared for the weather event, he added, and the cyclone was already downgraded as it approached and was considered a “low rain event”.
He was right. The Sunday ‘storm’ proved no worse than dozens of others that hit the country every year, causing the usual flooding, slips and power outages (not much of our lines infrastructure has yet to be buried underground).
The weather around the country, particularly in the Hawke’s Bay and Wellington regions the following weekend was far worse and left those facing storm damage wondering where the warnings were. As Victoria University Climate Science Professor James Renwick said, the technology doesn’t exist to predict a storm like that. Such storms in a maritime climate are inherently fast-forming and unpredictable.
It raises the question of whether councils need to be careful of crying weather-wolf once too often and leaving their communities complacent. And am I wrong in thinking councils and authorities are simply getting nervous about their public liabilities? At least they can say we were “warned”, if you know what I mean.
As the country cowered under the perceived threat of Cyclone Vaianu, I kept thinking – how usual is it to get a cyclone in autumn, then I remembered (that’s how old I am), Cyclone Giselle in April 1968. It started as a minor tropical cyclone to our far north, expected to head east as they do. Instead, it dramatically changed course and headed south to Wellington. At the same time, a deep depression was heading up the South Island and the two storms met at the same time as the large, overnight Lyttelton to Wellington ferry Wahine approached the harbour entrance. The rest is history. And that history over the past 200 years is a legacy of tragic storms and man-made disasters that could have been avoided if we had taken a more proactive stance towards avoiding them, rather than simply reacting to them.
Let’s admit it, we have been perpetually at serious risk from seismic, weather and volcanic disasters (with a dose of human stupidity), since our first recorded history of events. Even Abel Tasman spent the Christmas of 1642 here, sheltering his ships from a violent summer storm. A massive landslide on the shores of Lake Taupo killed 60 villagers in 1846 and another 40 lives were lost in the “great storm” of 1868 that swept the country. That wasn’t climate change – that was just our tempestuous weather and the vulnerability of human habitat.
When are we going to stop making excuses (such as climate change conjecture) and face the overdue and costly reality of preparation, provision and prevention?
I suspect it’s another funding issue. As with most things in a country that leans towards champagne tastes on a beer budget, cost realities and bigger budgets should be up there with any change in emergency response direction. CDEM groups rely heavily on local authorities, which are under significant financial pressure, particularly smaller councils. That’s a reality. Perhaps we can divert the funding of quixotically impossible and outrageously expensive “emission targets” to spend on weather protection and more resilient infrastructure? Let’s do something about the slash waiting to rage down our rivers and let the extraction industry keep our East Coast riverbeds low. Let’s reinforce our old rural bridges and stop sweating our assets. And take other road-making lessons from others (parts of temperate Australia), where there are similar soils and rainfalls.
The low-lying areas of Wellington got a pounding last month. Basin Reserve used to be a harbour seabed before it lifted out of the sea in a 19th-century earthquake. If we are going to build habitats in low lying areas you need to have the storm systems to cope. Natural streams and creeks in such areas need to be kept clear of rubbish (human and natural) and kept deep. There has been a trend to call them natural environments to be protected. They are not. Transversing human habitat, they are waterways that are part of an unnatural stormwater system.
We used to call our weather-related ‘incidents’ acts of God. Now we call them the consequences of climate change.
Whatever you want to call it, it has happened before and will happen again – just get prepared and stop complaining, please. As Abel Tasman might have said almost 400 years ago, it’s just a local storm, batten the hatches, heave-to, and drop the heavy anchors. It will pass, and there will always be calm sailing days ahead as long as you are prepared and equipped for the days that are not.