Bad weather in the making?

[MotherBear]

[color=green:75a7093d9b]Not a very good welcome for Stevejan. They may well be in the BOP by now.[/color:75a7093d9b][img:75a7093d9b]http://www.addis-welt.de/smilie/smilie/wetter/regnparaply.gif[/img:75a7093d9b]

[b:75a7093d9b]Rain causes floods in BOP and Gisborne[/b:75a7093d9b]
11 February 2006

Flood damage will keep State Highway 2 closed at Matata until tomorrow.
Whakatane police are monitoring the situation which will be reassessed about 9am tomorrow. The Waimana gorge between Waimana and Taniatua also remains closed as the result of a slip, Inspector Ian Brooker, of the police northern communications centre, said. "All other previously reported road closures have been lifted although care is required on some sections," he said.

Matata has endured a 24-hour 150mm deluge, which has disrupted life in the area. Newstalk ZB reported that the owner of the Matata Hotel, Warren Freeman, said nine people were stranded at his hotel last night but all of them were all in good spirits. Mr Freeman said they were a bit nervous after the floods of last May.

Civil Defence was called out overnight to ensure no one was at risk from fallen boulders, downed trees and land slips. Diane Turner of the Whakatane District Council said that since last May's disastrous floods, precautions had been in place to ensure the community was safe. Those procedures were activated last night.

Today the MetService this morning lifted heavy rain warnings for Bay of Plenty and parts of Gisborne after torrential rain caused flooding and landslides, closing roads, through much of the region overnight. MetService said the frontal band which had brought heavy rain to the Bay of Plenty during the night was over Gisborne about 7.30am.

It was expected to remain slow moving there through to tomorrow but had weakened. Further rain was expected in Gisborne into Sunday morning, particularly in the north, but heavy falls were not expected. As a result rainfall warnings for the Bay of Plenty and Gisborne north of Tokomaru Bay were lifted.

Flooding also led to phone and internet connection problems for some people in the Whakatane area. Telecom spokesman John Goulter said problems with voice calls on fixed line phones and the internet started about 2.45am. Work crews had been able to restore services to some customers by bypassing the affected area but remained constrained by flood waters in some places. The high waters meant workers could not get to the fibre in some areas to investigate the outage, Mr Goulter said shortly after 11am.

Part of the problem at the time was uncertainty about whether the main fault was on the Telecom network or that of TelstraClear, and the companies were working together to isolate it. Heavy rains also caused chaos on roads further south in the North Island overnight with police reporting extensive flooding on SH 1 between Manakau and Levin. In Lower Hutt, heavy rain caused surface flooding on SH 2.