Traffic queued as cars drive through the remaining floodwater on St Lukes Road on Saturday morning. Photo: RNZ / Calvin Samuel
Auckland Emergency Management (AEM) general manager Adam Maggs is defending the agency's response to the wild weather that lashed the city over the long weekend.
An Auckland City councillor and a raft of voices on social media responded with frustration after official warnings of the intense and severe storm arrived after the worst part of the storm did.
Some Aucklanders said the severe weather alerts, sent several minutes of each other on Saturday, were too little too late, with flooding reported on Easter Friday night.
Photo: RNZ / Nik Dirga
AEM opened a civil defence centre and provided emergency accommodation for ten displaced families over the weekend in response.
"On Friday night we had a watch in place which is a lower level alert to let us know, our population should be prepared by the risk is lower," Maggs said.
"But on Saturday we had a different situation, we had saturated soil, we had residents who had been displaced, we had vulnerable communities in Mount Roskill and Sandringham and the emergency mobile alert is one of the tools we can use to communicate to the public, its very effective when you need a lot of reach.
"We looked at the thresholds and said look is this severe, likely to cause damage to property of life risk? And we said yes it could.
"We also looked at saturation, time of day, it was in the afternoon lots of Aucklanders were travelling, there were lots of people on the road so we made that call."
The Auckland Emergency Management general manager said it's important people rely on agencies who send out mobile alerts.
"If people get a mobile alert that is a call to take action," he said.
"I appreciate they're intrusive they alert people and I've spoken with many that find it frustrating, I absolutely understand that however our role is to alert our public when there is a likely or urgent risk and we'll do that in the best way we can."
"The mobile alert is that mechanism when we get these sort of situations," he said.
Adam Maggs said Vector is leading the response to restore power to pockets of Auckland but AEM has offered some assistance over the long weekend but didn't know how many properties were still without power.
He said volunteer response teams had been out in some of the areas that may still be affected by outages, knocking on doors and doing welfare checks.
"The work they've done will assist Vector in prioritising their work plans for today," said Maggs.
Auckland Council's building inspection teams have already carried out 16 inspections on properties that reported flooding.
A further 50-plus properties that reported lesser impacts will be inspected this week but so far, none of those properties would meet the threshold of a yellow or red placard under emergency declaration conditions according to AEM.
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
