Cyclone Gabrielle: New Zealand declares national emergency as storm triggers floods, landslides
- The tropical storm battered the North Island, causing extensive damage, power outages and stranding people on roof tops
- Prime Minister Chris Hipkins urged people not to panic-buy supplies as dozens of supermarkets remained closed
Cancelled flights stranded thousands of people, while hundreds of thousands remained without power.
“The severity and the breadth of the damage that we are seeing has not been experienced in a generation,” Prime Minister Chris Hipkins told a news conference on Tuesday.
“I want to acknowledge the situation New Zealanders have been waking up to this morning,” Hipkins said. “A lot of families displaced. A lot of homes without power. Extensive damage done across the country.”
“It will take us a wee while to get a handle on exactly what’s happened and, in due course, helping with the clean-up when we get to that point,” he said.
Australia and Britain had pledged support, he added.
Gabrielle had moved southeast of Auckland, near the east coast of the country’s North Island, and was expected to continue moving southeast, roughly parallel to the coast. Weather warnings remained in place for much of the east coast of the North Island and upper South Island.
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Auckland braces for Cyclone Gabrielle as thousands in New Zealand left without power
About 225,000 people were left without electricity, while dozens of supermarkets closed, with Hipkins urging New Zealanders not to panic-buy supplies.
The power grid had not experienced such damage since 1988, when Cyclone Bola became one of the most destructive storms to ever hit New Zealand, Hipkins said.
Hipkins could not yet say how the scale of the latest destruction compared to Cyclone Bola.
“Certainly, the reports that we’ve had is that it’s the most extreme weather event that we’ve experienced in a very long time,” Hipkins told reporters in Wellington. “In the fullness of time, we’ll know how it compares with Cyclone Bola.”
Architect Lars von Minden, 50, lives in Muriwai, a beach town on the coast west of Auckland.
“I’ve seldom seen anything like it,” he said by phone. “There are three or four areas where there are just these massive slips, some of them 300m (1,000 feet) across, that have come down, taking out houses and roads and everything.”
Kieran McAnulty, minister of emergency management, said that while New Zealand was now through the worst of the storm, more rain and high winds were expected.
The country was suffering from extensive flooding, landslides and damage to roads and infrastructure, he added.
Transmission companies around the country are reporting damage to substations and power networks.
Authorities have evacuated beach settlements and are urging still more people to leave homes as rivers continue to swell and huge surf inundates beachfront properties.
Roads are closed, mobile phone services down and some towns cut off. Residents in hard-hit areas are being asked to conserve water and food because of fears of shortages.
Air New Zealand restarted some flights in and out of Auckland, though many routes remained disrupted. The airline announced it intends to resume flight services from midafternoon on Tuesday, after a total of 592 flights had been impacted.
It said in a statement it intends to start with resuming turboprop operations, but warned that strong high winds may pose some challenges.
Helicopter and boat crews were rescuing people trapped by rapidly rising floodwater in Hawke’s Bay, southeast of Auckland.
Hipkins said it was too early to say how many people had been displaced or injured. No deaths have been confirmed.
Media reported one person was missing after a house had slid down a hill in Hawke’s Bay, while the fire and emergency service said a volunteer firefighter was still in a house that had been swept downhill in a landslide.
Local media published photographs and video of people sitting on top of buildings surrounded by floodwater, of houses swept to the bottom of hills by landslides and of roads under water.
A New Zealand warship rescued a person from a yacht that turned on its emergency beacon on Tuesday morning off the east coast.
New Zealand declared national emergencies after an earthquake in 2011 and when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020.
Additional reporting Associated Press
