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About this time last year, we'd had a very dry winter and summer and my mother, who is prone to worrying about things, said "Suppose climate change means we just never get any more rain?"
Well.
Auckland has a temperate subtropical climate, which is nice a lot of the time as it means it never gets really really hot or really really cold. However, the price we pay for this is that where other people have lovely snowy winter days, we get rain. Lots of rain.
And last winter, despite my mother's worries, was no exception. In fact it rained every day in August.
What we weren't expecting, though, was that it would continue to rain in the summer. People tend to take their summer holidays right after Christmas here as it's the long school holidays then, but a lot of people had to come home early as there was so much rain. Little did we know that that would be the good part of the summer. Last week our North Island had what they call an "atmospheric river". This has a fancy meteorological meaning, but what it's actually like is that it's as wet in the sky as it is in a river.
280mm (eleven inches) of rain fell in 24 hours. There was massive flooding. Four people died. New Zealand is extremely bumpy, and that means that high levels of rain cause lots of slips. Cliff faces slipped, occasionally taking whole houses with them. Many roads were either covered with slips or themselves slipped, cutting off communities.
This is far from as bad as it got in Auckland, but I never expected in my lifetime to see a car afloat on the motorway:
Nor did I expect to see people wading through floodwaters inside the airport:
It didn't help that there was an Elton John concert that night that was called off half an hour before it was due to start, leaving 11,000 people trying to make their way home. It was also just before the start of a long weekend, with thousands of Aucklanders trying to get out of the city. What. A. Mess.
A few days later, we had another atmospheric river. More flooding, not as bad as the first, but so far more than 1,200 houses are red- or yellow-stickered. And it's still raining, with no end in sight. January has been the wettest month on record.
I was one of the lucky ones who were 100% fine. I live on the top of a ridge and rainfall drains away from my property. I've always joked that I never had to worry about flooding, the joke being that there seemed no reason why there would be a flood in the first place. Yeah, totally left climate change out of that reasoning.
Well.
Auckland has a temperate subtropical climate, which is nice a lot of the time as it means it never gets really really hot or really really cold. However, the price we pay for this is that where other people have lovely snowy winter days, we get rain. Lots of rain.
And last winter, despite my mother's worries, was no exception. In fact it rained every day in August.
What we weren't expecting, though, was that it would continue to rain in the summer. People tend to take their summer holidays right after Christmas here as it's the long school holidays then, but a lot of people had to come home early as there was so much rain. Little did we know that that would be the good part of the summer. Last week our North Island had what they call an "atmospheric river". This has a fancy meteorological meaning, but what it's actually like is that it's as wet in the sky as it is in a river.
280mm (eleven inches) of rain fell in 24 hours. There was massive flooding. Four people died. New Zealand is extremely bumpy, and that means that high levels of rain cause lots of slips. Cliff faces slipped, occasionally taking whole houses with them. Many roads were either covered with slips or themselves slipped, cutting off communities.
This is far from as bad as it got in Auckland, but I never expected in my lifetime to see a car afloat on the motorway:
Nor did I expect to see people wading through floodwaters inside the airport:
It didn't help that there was an Elton John concert that night that was called off half an hour before it was due to start, leaving 11,000 people trying to make their way home. It was also just before the start of a long weekend, with thousands of Aucklanders trying to get out of the city. What. A. Mess.
A few days later, we had another atmospheric river. More flooding, not as bad as the first, but so far more than 1,200 houses are red- or yellow-stickered. And it's still raining, with no end in sight. January has been the wettest month on record.
I was one of the lucky ones who were 100% fine. I live on the top of a ridge and rainfall drains away from my property. I've always joked that I never had to worry about flooding, the joke being that there seemed no reason why there would be a flood in the first place. Yeah, totally left climate change out of that reasoning.
