As New Zealand’s very stormy second half of summer begins limping towards early autumn, and the amount of daylight each day starts to shorten, there is no let-up in the bubbling, energetic tropics to the north. The air and oceans here are reaching peak heat productivity and spawning and sending out spinning masses of wind and rain to travel towards our shores.
The rain and wind effects of the latest tropically fuelled storm were being felt across the South yesterday as the system finally began dwindling. It bashed Canterbury and Banks Peninsula on Monday night and absolutely hammered the southern and eastern North Island on Sunday.
It’s difficult to believe this malevolent system barely existed just four days ago before rapidly winding up into something so damaging. Wellingtonians, who usually don’t bat an eye over gale-force winds, experienced their strongest southerly windstorm for more than a decade, while much of the flat land of Wairarapa lies badly flooded.
Those who recall the far more extreme Wahine Storm caused by former tropical Cyclone Giselle in April 1968 will notice this latest system followed a similar north-south path down the country’s east coast, centred not more than a couple of hundred kilometres from shore. On this track such a deep depression can slowly unravel its misery across several days to affect more than one million Kiwis.
On Sunday, MetService issued a red severe warning for torrential rain for parts of the central North Island, its 21st at that top tier since the system was introduced in May 2019.
All the red-coded warnings over that time have been for rain or wind, or rain and wind combined, and none have been for heavy snow. That has always been a lesser likely event for heavily populated areas of the country, but that not one of the 21 was for snow shows how our climate is steadily changing.
The question is, in the face of so much destructive weather, do we need to be rethinking our use of the word "extreme"? At what point does extreme become something more like a new normal? Can something which occurs every few months still be extreme?
Extreme can apply to the magnitude and frequency of an event. As the world’s weather is catalysed by warmer, moister and more energetic atmospheric and oceanic conditions, a storm which now occurs once a year may not be considered as extreme, in terms of frequency, as if it happened decades ago.
Keeping New Zealand viable
Another colossal issue facing New Zealand is the ongoing deterioration of our critical infrastructure. Almost as big a problem for the country have been the associated dual curses of short-termism and the "she’ll be right" attitude which have led us where we are today.
New Zealand Inc is really in a spot of bother when it comes to guaranteeing a viable future for its citizens and ensuring the First World services we expect will continue.
Those services are already crumbling at an alarming pace. Look at the state of hospitals, the dreadful debacle at Moa Point and at some of our other wastewater facilities, roads and networks which collapse and leave thousands isolated every time a storm system hits the country.
Good on the government for taking steps to address this, asking the independent Infrastructure Commission to come up with a 30-year plan, which was released yesterday.
The plan outlines 10 priorities for urgent action in the next few years, including more investment in hospitals, a more realistic look at roading, catching up on replacing decaying water networks, identifying cost-effective flood-protection infrastructure, and robust market rules around electrifying the economy and achieving net-zero carbon targets.
Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop says the plan "does not sugar-coat things". That’s good. There’s been too much of that in recent decades.
It now has to be discussed by the government and debated with politicians across the House. Our hope is that strong consensus will be reached to give crucial long-term work the best chance of success it can have irrespective of the three-year parliamentary terms.
