Questions for MetService about warnings issued for 'badly impacted' Waitomo District

There have been calls for a review of the warnings issued ahead of last week's weather event which brought down hundreds of slips, closed dozens of central North Island roads, inundated farms and flooded homes.

An orange warning was issued, but the mayor of the Waitomo District and the Minister for Rural Communities are questioning whether that should have been upgraded.

Marokopa sheep and beef farmer Chris Lovell was docking lambs with his family and trying to get on with life when RNZ visited after near record rains swamped his property, leaving its best paddocks caked with suffocating silt.

"The river just came over the banks and just kept coming up and we were in the house which is on a hill and had to watch in dismay as it started to go over everything, over fences, over gateways.

"We'd moved the stock to safety the night before because we're sort of used to heavy rain on the west coast but this was exceptional. It's muddy water, it's not nice, there's lot's of debris and as the water recedes it just gets worse and worse as you see the damage."

He was afraid to leave the house to check on his stock at the height of the storm.

"I thought I should be doing something but I couldn't get out. I wanted to check, you know like, the sheep. I wanted to check there was nothing stuck on islands, but I couldn't get out myself.

"Several times I started to wade out to see in the driveway and I decided it would be silly to even try."

Minister concerned

Minister for Rural Communities Mark Patterson was visiting the Waitomo District with mayor John Robinson and Taranaki-King Country MP Barbara Kuriger.

He wanted to gauge the scale of the damage caused by a weather event he believed had flown under the radar.

"What's happened is there's widespread isolated pockets where it's really badly impacted and I think where we are here you can see some fairly widespread damage, $50,000 to $60,000 worth according to the farmers, and if you replicate that around the rest of the province it mounts up."

Patterson said he would be reporting to his colleagues in Wellington about whether a Mayoral Relief Fund was necessary and he was expecting NZ Transport Agency to step up in terms of repairing the ruined roads.

A farmer himself, the minister was not convinced farmers had enough warning about how severe the weather was likely to be.

"There will be some questions asked of MetService. How they missed this 50mm to 70mm forecast over 200mm delivered in some places, so we're going to have a pretty thorough review about why they missed this.

"You know, is it a systematic problem, do we need better rain radars like we have invested in Tasman subsequently, so those questions need to be asked."

It should have been red - mayor

Waitomo mayor John Robinson was on the same page as the Minister.

"Yes, so it was an orange warning and it should've been a red warning. Clearly they were severe storms. When we get 150mm in 24 hours of rain, for this district that is huge, that is a month's worth of rain in 24 hours."

Chris Lovell was a bit more forgiving.

"The warning system was on yellow, which is just a warning, and it wasn't raised to orange until the morning when we already had water going over our fences by then, but the radar and the forecast, the three-day forecast, didn't look good and living here we like to sleep at night, so we take our stock off the flats if there's a chance."

He said as long as the three-day forecast map was available and the rain radar was working farmers could see if they were going to be in the red zone.

MetService chief meteorologist Chris Noble said it was was standard practice for all severe weather warnings it issued to be recorded and reviewed through an internal post-event verification process.

"This process includes an assessment of the model forecasts that were available prior to the event (that informed the pre-event warnings), reviews the Watches and Warnings that were issued, and assesses the rainfall that occurred against what was forecast (timings, amounts etc.).

"Where relevant it also includes working with affected councils and/or Civil Defence groups."

Noble said the review would take time to complete, "but any lessons learned would contribute to, and improve where relevant, MetService's processes and the severe weather warning system and its outputs".

Meanwhile, the rural community was rallying around helping farmers get back on their feet.

Adrian Marsh was with a group of shearers clearing fences on the Marokopa to Awakino road.

"Well, we've got the fence line for the farms, for their paddocks and it's covered in, you know, logs, sticks, grass, you name it, and we've just come out to clean up and tidy it up a bit."

He said it was a quiet time for shearers so he and his mates were happy to help out the farmers with the unexpected and unwanted extra work.

Beyond the fence line the paddock was caked in mud and silt.

'Pretty scary'

Barbara Kuriger, also a farmer, knew that was bad news for Lovell and his neighbours.

"The grass just rots, so you can see that's setting and it's going to go completely hard and it's going to need to be reploughed up and planted again because that's never going to grow again. It won't come through the silt, weeds might, but the grass is going to need resowing.

"There were lots of slips along the road but out here you can see it's taken the brunt of it. When you look at what's been pulled off the fences here you can just imagine how high that water was. It would've been pretty scary the other day."

She would be working with Robinson and Patterson to see what help they could get the farmers.

Robinson said, while here had been a lot of focus on the five state highways closed during the weather event and its aftermath, 30 local Waitomo roads had been closed at one stage and were severely damaged.

He was hoping for a helping had from NZTA to repair those including the Marokopa to Awakino road which had been reduced to rubble in places.

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