Wairoa declares a state of emergency as overnight flooding forces evacuations and cuts power across the east coast

Wairoa is under a state of local emergency after a night of heavy rain drove rivers up, forced people from their homes and knocked out power to hundreds of properties across the east of the North Island. Mayor Craig Little declared the emergency at 11pm on Thursday as floodwaters spread through the district, and by Friday morning the storm that battered the upper South Island earlier in the week had moved north and settled over Hawke’s Bay and Tairāwhiti.

The declaration followed what the Wairoa District Council described as significant flooding across the district, with rising river levels affecting homes, businesses, farms, roads and essential services. An emergency mobile alert was sent to residents in the low-lying streets between Outram and Grant Streets, and between Kopu Road and Apatu Street, telling them to leave immediately and take essential items and pets with them. Two evacuation centres were opened during the night, at Taihoa Marae and the Wairoa War Memorial Hall, so people leaving their homes had somewhere warm and dry to go.

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For a town that has been through this before, the warning signs were painfully familiar. Wairoa flooded badly in Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023 and again in mid 2024, and the same low ground close to the river mouth is the first to go under. This time the council said the danger was made worse by timing. A high tide was due at 12.47am on Friday, and staff warned that outgoing river water and rising flow from the upper catchments were competing against large three to four metre swells pushing in from the coast at the river mouth. When the river cannot drain to the sea, the water backs up into the streets.

The power cuts spread well beyond Wairoa. Lines company Firstlight Network reported around 300 properties without electricity in Wairoa, roughly 200 in Gisborne and about 170 on the East Cape near Tolaga Bay, taking the total across the region past 600 homes and businesses at the peak. Most of the outages were caused by trees coming down on power lines and wires being brought down in the wind, which makes repairs slow and dangerous while the weather is still bad and crews cannot safely reach every fault.

MetService had flagged the risk a day earlier. An orange heavy rain warning covered the ranges of Hawke’s Bay north of Napier, running for 24 hours until 9am Friday, with forecasters expecting another 100 to 130 millimetres of rain on top of what had already fallen and peak rates of 10 to 20 millimetres an hour. A heavy rain watch was in place for Tairāwhiti south of Gisborne city, and strong wind warnings and watches stretched down the country through Taranaki, the Marlborough Sounds, Taupō, coastal Hawke’s Bay, Wellington and the Kāpiti Coast, with gusts of up to 120 kilometres an hour forecast in exposed places. You can read the full run of warnings on 1News.

Roads took a heavy hit. State Highway 2 between Napier and Wairoa was closed, along with State Highway 38 north of Wairoa between Frasertown and Tuai, and a stretch of State Highway 2 between Gisborne and Ōpōtiki from Te Karaka to Whatatutu Road. With the main routes shut, Wairoa was effectively cut off from both directions for a time, the same isolation that has made past emergencies in the town so hard to manage.

The storm has been a long one. It arrived over the weekend and first hit the top of the South Island, where Kaikōura was buried under close to two months of rain in 48 hours, rivers burst their banks and about 150 people were evacuated. Kaikōura remains under its own state of emergency with State Highway 1 closed and repairs expected to run into the school holidays. As that system tracked north it dragged a cold southerly behind it, dumping snow across Otago and Southland and leaving hundreds without power in Gore, Balclutha, Palmerston and Invercargill earlier in the week before the rain reached the east coast.

By Friday morning council officials said conditions in Wairoa were improving, with the heaviest rain easing and the immediate threat starting to lift, though the state of emergency stayed in place while crews checked stopbanks, roads and water systems and welfare teams reached the people who had left their homes. The advice to anyone in the warning zones was the simplest and oldest of all, which is not to drive through floodwater and to move to higher ground if water starts rising around a property rather than waiting to see how bad it gets.

The clean up will take longer than the storm. Firstlight Network crews face the slow work of clearing fallen trees and restringing lines, roading contractors have to inspect and reopen the highways, and farmers on the flats around Wairoa will be counting stock losses and pasture damage once the water drops. For now the message from the council is to stay off closed roads, keep away from swollen rivers and check on neighbours, especially older people and anyone living alone.

Live weather updates are being posted by RNZ, and the latest warnings and watches are on the MetService website.

Were you affected by the flooding in Wairoa or the wider east coast, or did you lose power in the storm? Share what you saw and how your community coped in the comments below.

This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂