The day the cyclone came The day the cyclone came

• Published date: 18 February 2023
• Publication title: New Zealand Herald, The (Auckland, New Zealand)

Hours earlier a cyclone, powerful after getting a generous start to life in extra-warm tropical waters a week earlier, and now so sprawling its mass curled tip to toe across the North Island, had unleashed a trail of destruction from the Far North to Manawatū — and most ruthlessly in the east

At Muriwai, a hilly, bush-backed beach settlement about 40 kilometres and a million miles from downtown Auckland, five seconds of cellphone footage posted to Twitter on Tuesday afternoon laid bare the horror that residents and their rescuers had faced overnight when the atmospheric pressure at the centre of Cyclone Gabrielle plunged as the weather system had spun along New Zealand’s northeastern coast.

A landslide, a broken home and a mud-caked driveway, but also, among the still-swaying trees and bush, that familiar clicking choir. HALF A day later and 200km to the southeast, it was a scene repeated as a TV reporter, standing before a partially slip-blocked Coromandel Peninsula road, told an Australian breakfast show two people were already confirmed dead in cut-off Hawke’s Bay, which had emerged alongside neighbouring Tairāwhiti as the epicentre of devastation and loss.

“Sadly I can tell you, too, that the search is ongoing for a missing firefighter at Muriwai ... he’s the local vet, known to so many, including my family,” she said, as the steady whirr of cicada song crossed the Tasman alongside her sombre dispatches.

But for the hundreds plucked from roofs, trees or whatever they could cling to when flooded rivers swept with deadly force through several eastern North Island communities, it’s the steady whir of helicopter blades slicing the air that may be their song of summer.

It was the sound of a second chance not all would hear.

“I was just thinking I was going to die,” said dog trainer Alastair Needes from his evacuation centre cot, after a failed attempt to save his neighbour’s drowning horses early on Tuesday ended with him stranded on a shipping container surrounded by rapidly rising floodwaters.

Nearby, his wife had scrambled on to the roof of their home in Pakowhai, near Hastings.

“We thought we were done for,” said Needes, his speech halting.

“And then suddenly the helicopter came.”KIWIS WERE busy marking Waitangi Day, 183 years since the country’s founding document was signed, when the Australian Bureau of Meteorology reported Tropical Low 14U had developed in the abnormally warm waters of the Coral Sea.

Any impact on New Zealand would depend on the cyclone’s eventual path, MetService tweeted the same day, but noted “if it does approach NZ this weekend or early next it will be a significant weather event”.

Two days later, after riding a ridge of high pressure towards Queensland, it was classified as a tropical cyclone and the Australians gave it a name, Gabrielle.

By Thursday last week, the MetService’s severe weather outlook included potential impacts, including damaging winds, flooding and coastal inundation, all from Sunday and mostly for the North Island.

By Saturday, wind and rain watches and warnings had been issued, including the highest — Red — for heavy rain in Coromandel Peninsula and Tairāwhiti, north of Tolaga Bay.

Auckland and Northland received Red level rain and wind warnings a day later.

Cyclone Gabrielle was now officially a low, but that “doesn’t mean it’s weaker”, the Government weather agency warned.

“This is not a system to ignore, the worst is yet to come.”

By early Sunday afternoon, Cape Reinga was recording gusts of 140km/h, waves were surging over Paihia’s wharf and thousands in the region had lost power. By 4.30pm, Northland Civil Defence had declared a precautionary local state of emergency.

In Auckland, still recovering two weeks after a summer’s worth of rain fell on one deadly and destructive day, nervous residents filled sandbags, schools announced closures and public transport — including flights to and from the country’s northern cities — were pre-emptively canned or curtailed.

By early afternoon, the...