Some Auckland residents living in the flood-prone suburb of Wesley are frustrated at the lack of warning from authorities about the Easter Friday storm.
Auckland Council and MetService have been under fire for failing to issue weather alerts and warnings before the Friday night storm that saw streets and garages flooded, power outages and two people trapped in cars by floodwaters.
Auckland Emergency Management (AEM) confirmed central suburbs like Mount Roskill and Sandringham recorded more than 100mm of rain during the thunderstorms.
MetService issued a yellow thunderstorm watch alert just after midnight on Saturday, as heavy rain flooded parts of the city, and AEM issued its first notice to Aucklanders about the storm at 12.42am.
Lesieli Aholelei-Yitiri – whose family home next to Oakley Creek had to be refloored, after damage from the 2023 Auckland Anniversary floods – said her backyard was flooded again.
She said they needed to move their cars to higher ground, after the waters rose to shin-deep levels in their backyard after 2am.
Aholelei-Yitiri said she was frustrated at the lack of advance warnings.
“Because there were no weather warnings, there’s nothing really… we’ve got no communication,” she said.
“It’s frustrating, because we didn’t want to go through this [again].”
After seeing the impact of the 2023 storms, Aholelei-Yitiri said she felt responsible to warn her neighbours.
“Got my husband to go next door, just to check on the neighbours there, because they’re new to the neighbourhood and they don’t know what happened here two to three years ago.
“My husband went over and knocked on the door, and they were dead asleep… they didn’t know anything about what was happening.”
Aholelei-Yitiri’s family of 10, put sandbags around their house as a precaution against further storms, after receiving AEM’s first emergency phone alerts on Saturday.
She said she felt the Oakley Creek area had been poorly maintained.
“It’s overgrown, it’s not looked after. We’re paying our rates, our taxes and stuff, and what are we getting out of it?”
She said council’s upgrades to Oakley Creek, before the Auckland Anniversary floods, didn’t seem to reduce the risks of flooding.
Wesley resident Michelle Finau, whose home was also badly damaged in the Anniversary floods, said Friday’s storm kept her family awake until 3am.
“Our whole house was awake, just because of how we were affected in the past with the floods,” she said. “We couldn’t go to sleep, because we were afraid it might be a repeat, so we didn’t go to sleep until the rain fully calmed down.”
Finau’s family had to stay in cabins for about six months after the 2023 storms and repairs to their house took more than eight months.
She was disappointed that authorities were slow to respond to Friday’s storm, despite past lessons.
“Because of what happened in the past, with the the floods in 2023, we would think that they would have had a quick response, but then what happened on Friday – there was no warnings.”
A community group – Acts of Roskill Kindness Trust – that had supported 20-30 families affected by the weekend storm, was aware of blocked culverts in the Oakley Creek area, both private and public.
Coordinator Richard Barton said there were thousands of culverts around the city and, while Auckland Council had cameras monitoring the key chokepoints, it was hard to monitor everywhere at once.
He said Wesley was home to many renters and some residents had been hit several times by floods.
“Some of those people are still rebuilding or still having homes rebuilt, after the anniversary weekend floods, and the same places tend to flood each time.”
Auckland Council Healthy Waters manager Leigh Steckler said Oakley Creek catchment had a long history of flooding and a restoration project completed in 2019 involved measures to reduce flood risk, including replacing the concrete channel with naturalised stream, planting native vegetation to enhance its flood performance.
Steckler said the improvements were part of a longer-term programme to improve the area’s flood resilience.
A further area in the catchment – between Winstone Rd and May Rd – was identified as a potential site, under the council’s Making Space for Water programme, but options weren’t designed or costed yet.
Steckler said networks like Oakley Creek relied on ongoing maintenance and the council had dedicated funding for the upkeep of the stream.
“Auckland Council has a maintenance contractor that ensures there are no blockages in the stream on a monthly basis, The creek was last inspected in the week prior to Easter, which found it was clear.”
Meanwhile, AEM general manager Adam Maggs said weather warnings and watches were issued by MetService, and its role was to share that information.
“We are not weather forecasters and rely on the subject matter expertise of appointed agencies – MetService for weather – to guide us and provide the right advice for Aucklanders,” he said.
“Thunderstorms are notoriously difficult to forecast. No amount of analysis of rain radars and satellite imagery will predict where the most rain will fall, how it will impact that area and exactly when to expect it.”
Maggs said an emergency management alert was not sent on Friday evening, because the advice it received did not meet the threshold for it.
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