Lightning blasts Northland

Heavy rain is shown with the blue, lightning is shown with crosses, with the most recent lightning coloured red, older lightning coloured purple. Photo / MetService

Northland bore the brunt of nearly 8000 lightning strikes that hit the upper North Island, causing power outages throughout the region and surface flooding.

The thunderstorms south of Kerikeri were at their peak between 7am-9am yesterday and after a lull for the rest of the day, they were expected back last night.

MetService meteorologist Elke Louw said an active trough moving in a northeasterly direction from the South Island was responsible for thunderstorms, high-intensity rainfall and strong winds.

Another trough expected last night was expected to bring more thunderstorms throughout Northland, although Ms Louw said they would not be as severe as those experienced earlier in the day.

The good news is that Northlanders should enjoy blue skies today and throughout the rest of the week, with Saturday forecast to be the best day for those wanting to venture out.

Gusty westerlies should also ease off later this afternoon.

Northpower lines crews attended to multiple minor outages on its electricity network in Whangarei and Kaipara yesterday morning.

Company spokesman Steve MacMillan said about 1000 customers were believed to have been without power, although that figure constantly changed as fuses were put back in and potential damage to transformers was assessed.

For safety reasons no line repairs were undertaken until the lightning storm had passed.

While Whangarei had small outages, lightning affected more people from south of the city to Kaiwaka.

At Tinopai, 409 customers were without power but 100 had their supplies restored fairly quickly.

Mr MacMillan said 460 customers were affected around Aranga and Donnellys Crossing, in Kaipara. Several crews worked together in the worst impacted areas to assess and repair damage.

A lightning strike at Northpower's Kamo substation about 11.20am yesterday caused a circuit-breaker feeder to fail, resulting in about 8000 people in Kamo and further north losing power briefly.

Most people across Whangarei and Kaipara had their electricity supply restored by lunchtime.

The Far North got off relatively lightly.

Top Energy said lightning strikes had caused outages to individual customers, particularly in the west of the district, but no widespread blackouts.

Spokesman Peter Heath said an outage in Kaikohe impacted 340 customers, while there were smaller outages in Totara North, Omapere and Kaeo. All power was expected to be restored by 7pm yesterday.