Nick Rogers is an Auckland-based engineer and director, and a leading expert on natural hazard resilience and risk.
OPINION: When I woke up on Friday morning, the first thing I did was go to the Met Service website to look at the weather forecast for Auckland.
A rain river was clearly visible on the projected weather map. Would Elton John’s concert be cancelled? If not, was it a good idea to go after all?
I understand rainfall and stormwater drainage. With a master’s degree in hydrology, I started my professional career with flood modeling. When I lived in Malaysia, I experienced monsoon rains. The warmer the temperature, the higher the precipitation intensity and the greater the amount of flash flooding.
In full wet weather gear we took a bus from the North Shore to Auckland CBD.
READ MORE:
* Govt needs to reconsider proposed emergency management law after Auckland mayor’s flood treatment
* Why Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown’s silence matters
* Countdown to Chaos: As Aucklanders desperate for safety, officials remained silent
At 4:50 p.m. near Commercial Bay, in torrential rain, a man walking towards me slipped on the flooded footpath and fell heavily on his back.
I stepped off the footpath to help and went thigh-deep in the water. Like Malaysia I thought.
At 5:30 pm we watched the concert. It was still on. No opinions from Auckland Council. So we got on the next bus to the stadium in the pouring rain. It was 5:45 PM.
It would take us 30 minutes to travel to Stanley St and 30 minutes to pass the Penrose slip road past the closed Penrose railway station.
STUFF
Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown and other officials were questioned by the media on Friday night about the timing of the state of emergency.
The bus was now crawling. Police sirens were a constant sound and images of flooded cars and closed roads began to appear on mobile phones. Clearly a great disaster was unfolding.
Our exit was closed again. It was now past 7pm and stories of flooding in Auckland were appearing on social media. We were still an hour away from the stadium.
Alarms should have gone off in the Auckland municipality that a major disaster was underway. The mayor says he was in the office from 4 p.m.
Just before 7:30 pm we were told that the concert had been canceled because it was too dangerous to go on. That was much too late, because almost all 40,000 concertgoers had already arrived.
The bus driver informed us that contractually he still had to go to the stadium but we could stay on the bus and he would try to get us back to the CBD.
Auckland Zoo/provided
Extraordinary scenes unfolded in Auckland as Friday’s deluge deepened. Auckland Zoo was one of many well-known city landmarks turned into lakes.
When we arrived at Mt Smart around 8:15pm we were greeted by long lines of soggy people hoping for an empty bus, but many had realized no help was on the way and were walking.
On our way back along Great South Rd, we passed flooded commercial buildings and flooded homes on side streets.
We picked up three Australian tourists who had come over for the concert. They had walked for over an hour and resorted to praying on the footpath.
Along Broadway we passed more flooded commercial properties, then through Parnell, and there, at the intersection of Stanley St, the spot we had passed four hours earlier was what appeared to be the ocean.
I understand that the Ports of Auckland have continually refused to allow the Auckland Council to construct a stormwater drain under Quay St to prevent flooding of this area.
Dan Willridge
Water floods a bus in Auckland traveling back from Elton John’s canceled concert on Friday night.
Like the double-decker Auckland Transport bus that had preceded us for a while with knee-deep water in it, we entered this brown sea hoping for the best.
The flooding we witnessed during our four hours on the bus was extraordinary. We were lucky. More people could easily have died.
Stay home, stay dry and stay safe are hollow words if you’re already in floodwaters at night trying to get home.
Unfortunately, by then some of those houses had been submerged by 2 meters of water – above the mayor’s height.
So, given the “river of rain” that was clearly visible, and the monsoon intensities that started to pick up and were recorded around 5pm, and the car strandings and road closures that happened around 7pm, why wasn’t a state of emergency declared and announced sooner?
The mayor says he signed on the dotted line within two minutes of being asked to declare a state of emergency.
I wonder.
./stuff
Nick Rogers QSO is a natural disaster specialist with decades of experience helping respond to natural disasters in New Zealand.
I have attended just about every natural disaster and all associated civil defense emergencies throughout New Zealand, starting with the Abbotsford landslide disaster in Dunedin in 1979.
In Northland, I witnessed the great flood disaster in February 1999. A state of emergency was declared by the mayor, Yvonne Sharp.
In July 2007, another major landslide and flood occurred in Northland, and again Mayor Sharp declared a state of emergency.
A week later, Wayne Brown declared his candidacy for mayor of the Far North and fired his first shot at Sharp, reportedly saying she was wrong to declare a state of emergency after the floods the week before .
Brown reportedly said there was no need to declare a state of emergency. “The place had already experienced a series of floods in March and everyone seemed a lot more prepared for this event, so I don’t understand why we needed the state of emergency. It just wasn’t necessary.”
I was present at both disasters and Yvonne Sharp was right when she declared a state of emergency in July 2007.
Thousands of people were endangered and some died in Auckland on Friday. Wayne Brown blames others for failing to declare a state of emergency sooner. But I have a nagging feeling that Wayne Brown may have felt, as in July 2007, that it “just wasn’t necessary”.