The past week has seen record rainfall over the upper North Island.
Photo: Screenshot / MetService

Northland had bands of heavy rain through the night, but fears the region would be hit as hard as Auckland was at the weekend proved unfounded.

The most rain fell around Whangārei airport, with 60mm in the eight hours to 4am today, with half of that falling in one hour around 9pm.

Northpower said more than 500 customers suffered a power cut just before 11pm after trees fell across lines. As of 9am Wednesday the power was still out west of Waipu, near Waiotira and Springfield, according to Northpower’s outage map.

While still under a state of emergency, the Northland skies on Wednesday morning appeared to be slowly drying up, with warnings lifted.

With just a “normal” amount of rain forecast for next couple of days, Northland Civil Defence Emergency Management chair and deputy mayor Kelly Stratford told Morning Report many residents could now go about their “normal business”.

“Yesterday was, as things developed through the day and the weather pattern was quite fast in the beginning and it slowed down, there was a couple of hours there where that sense of uncertainty was heightened.

“But gosh, in the afternoon as it bounced off, deflecting -I think we were all sending positive energy and it just skirted around us. We were all very happy.”

Asked for advice, she said to not hang any washing outside just yet.

“We’ve got showers coming. I think we’ll all still be using our drying racks.”

Huhana Lyndon of Tuparehuia Marae, also chief executive of the Ngatiwai Trust Board, said there were still high winds hitting her part of the country – Whangaruru, north of Whangārei, which regularly floods.

“Word on the street is that high tide has passed, and so we’ve got a couple of whānau going down to check out the floodwaters.”

She said there were reports of trees down in Whananaki, to the south, and she was still waiting on word from other parts of the region.

Early indications are however they were not hit too hard, despite Whangaruru being cut off.

“Our precaution with the state of emergency was good for Te Tai Tokerau,” she said, adding that Covid-19 taught them a lot about how to connect with locals during a crisis.

Roger Ball of the National Emergency Management Agency said at a media conference on Wednesday morning an assessment was conducted at first light.

“From what we could see, this band of heavy rain has left Northland with some fresh downpours, but things there seem to be reasonably stable and the impact is not significant.”

Ball said they were watching closely as the storm moves through Coromandel and Waikato.

“The indications at this early stage are that we may not have as much rain out of this event as was originally forecast.”

Four people were killed in Auckland’s floods at the weekend. Renewed heavy rain overnight renewed flooding in the city.