Auckland Anniversary floods one year on: Could the city cope with another storm like January 27?

Major flooding would likely again swamp thousands of Auckland homes and businesses should another extreme storm like last year’s Anniversary Weekend floods strike, the council has admitted.

Four people died in the January 27 catastrophe as emergency teams rushed to more than 700 calls for help, and dramatic photos emerged of rescues, landslips and cars floating down streets.

The storm dumped 307mm - or more than half a year’s rainfall - on Auckland in four days, forcing more than 600 people into emergency accommodation as up to 10,000 properties flooded.

Council staff placed hazard stickers on 7000 damaged properties, including about 3000 red and yellow placards on the most seriously damaged.

More than 2000 slips hit the city’s transport and water networks, while flooding closed major highways and Auckland Airport.

Auckland Council and the Government have now earmarked $2 billion funding for recovery projects, including plans to buy about 600 flood-damaged homes that pose the greatest risk to life for traumatised owners.

Private insurers have also so far paid out $1.5 billion in 50,000 insurance claims, while government agencies still face criticism over how they responded to the catastrophic storm.

But while most groups say they’ve learnt valuable lessons, the reality is thousands still sit in the firing line should such a deluge happen again, says Nick Vigar, head of planning for Auckland Council’s Healthy Waters department.

Another 1-in-100 year storm could impact about 50,000 city properties lying in overland flow paths and flood plains.

“It’s a hard truth that we have to be honest with people about is that if you got flooded in that event, you should prepare that more-or-less the same thing will happen,” he told the Herald.

It’s part of expert warnings that Aucklanders still face a long and costly battle with what many expect to be evermore frequent flooding and natural disasters.

Half a year’s rain in one day

Auckland’s wettest day on record was driven by what experts called a freak combination of weather forces.

At its height on January 27, the storm dumped 71mm on Auckland Airport in one hour, while 307mm - or almost half the city’s average annual rainfall - fell between that Friday and the end of the month.

Adding to emergency responders’ troubles was forecaster MetService’s failure to adequately warn about the scale of the approaching storm.

However - even if there had been more warning - the speed of the falls meant there was still nowhere for the water to go, says Auckland councillor Richard Hills, who chairs the city’s Planning, Environment and Parks Committee.

“There’s not really (existing) infrastructure that can take a whole summer’s rain in four hours,” he says.

Vigar from council’s Healthy Waters says “a pretty similar result” should be expected if a weather system like that hit the city again.

“The point is that mostly this is not things that you can solve with more and bigger stormwater pipes.”

Home buy-out scheme creaks into action

Auckland Council and central government’s most notable response to the storm is an $800 million pledge to get the most at-risk families out of harm’s way by buying out up to 700 flooded and slip-damaged homes no longer considered safe to live in.

It’s part of a $2 billion storm recovery programme, with affected homes including clusters in the West Auckland suburbs of Ranui, Swanson and Henderson and coastal communities of Piha, Karekare and Muriwai. Other clusters are in Milford and Māngere.

The first 100 such homes considered a “risk to life” were identified late last year.

Nearly all have so far been deemed “Category 3″, which means that nothing can be done to make them safe.

But other homes will be categorised as “2p”. That means they are currently a risk to life unless “property-level” interventions are made within two years, such as by raising the home on piles above flood waters and creating a raised access for safe entry and exit.

A third “2c” category is for homes where there is a risk to life that can only be mitigated if the council completes large infrastructure projects nearby, such as by building culverts or clearing streams for better stormwater run-off.

Auckland Council hopes to identify most of the 2c homes by March.

Yet building the new community infrastructure needed to make them safe could take five to 10 years.

That means the buy-out process could take months, years or even a decade, depending on each individual home.

In the meantime all these homes remain at a high risk from flooding or landslips should another big storm hit.

Surf lifesavers were responsible for rescuing scores of people during the Auckland Anniversary weekend floods.

‘Simmering frustrations’ at pace of flood repairs

As expensive as the buy-out scheme is, it only scratches the problem’s surface.

Homes expected to be purchased make up only about 10 per cent of all properties that officially reported damage from the floods - and only one-third of the 3000 that reported serious damage.

Council modelling predicts 50,000 properties could be affected by big flooding events.

It’s left many dreading each sign of rainfall, says Lyall Carter, spokesman for West Auckland is Flooding, a lobby group of flood-affected homeowners.

There is little sign of visible improvements that would reduce flooding in West Auckland and that is causing “simmering frustration”.

The only obvious change seen so far is that done by the community themselves to get “into the streams and clean them out”.

The slow-moving response has also seen homeowners try to get on with their lives.

In his street alone, some flooded residents have reinstated damaged homes.

“If the floods happen again, they’ll be flooded again,” Carter says.

Also on his street, six new townhouses have been built since the floods on a ridge, near where a landslip occurred.

The council insists it has been busy at work since the floods. Almost $400m has been earmarked to help fix roads and bridges. Nearly 3500 have been identified as requiring rebuilding, repairing or for “resilience” projects.

Half of the more than 2000 slips that damaged the city’s transport network have been fixed, while 65 per cent of the 11,000 requests for stormwater repairs have also been completed, the council says.

It’s also set up new cameras and other tools to monitor the stormwater network for blockages and to give early warning of heavy water flows.

Building smarter: Making space for water

There are bright spots for the future.

The Greenslade Reserve sports field in Northcote absorbed 12 million litres of flood water in just a matter of hours during January’s storm.

Remarkable photos showed it resembling a brown lake of muddy water on January 27. But by the next afternoon local residents were back playing on it at a time when many other parts of the city were still under water.

The reserve is part of a Kāinga Ora redevelopment that built 1700 new homes but also “day-lighted” stormwater pipes so the water ran through an improved Awataha Stream and “green” pathway of plants and lawns rather than pipes.

This helped keep nearby Northcote town centre and homes - which have typically flooded in lesser downpours - comparatively dry.

Auckland councillor Hills says 12 other major projects such as Northcote’s are under way across the city, with $800m funding from the recovery programme contributing to them.

Still, Hills concedes Northcote’s project was a decade in the making, meaning these projects won’t offer immediate relief to future flooding.

The reserve at Northcote during the January floods.

Big projects are also expensive, making spending on them an ongoing test of public and political will.

Many experts predict that a smaller, piecemeal approach to turn Auckland into a “sponge city” is needed.

That will need to try and create as many green spaces and natural streams across the city - often done by private citizens in private properties.

It will also require tough conversations about what types of housing should be built where and how flood resilience should be paid for.

It could add up to a slow, and sometimes grinding process.

West Auckland is Flooding’s Carter hopes Auckland stays the course, saying we can’t “concrete our way out of this”.

“If we do not make rapid change, we will continue to have communities inundated with floodwaters and displaced from their homes,” he says.

Emergency response: MetService’s failed forecast

While it is likely to take years, if not decades, to manage or redirect floodwaters, the way Auckland responds to emergencies can be improved now.

Most local and central government bodies claim to have learned critical lessons.

Key to January 27′s troubles was the lack of warning about the storm’s severity.

MetService concluded in a report last October that its forecasting model had performed badly in the lead-up.

That was in part because January 27 was an “anomaly” of weather circumstances that made it hard to predict.

“All weather models would still struggle to identify them in advance,” MetService spokeswoman Lisa Murray says.

However, the service’s meteorologists had learned valuable lessons and now believe they could “add value where the models cannot” should similar circumstances begin building in future.

MetService has also been working closely with councils and emergency services to simplify its severe warnings system.

It is also launching mobile notifications to send future alerts direct to app users.

Wayne Brown missing, and flooded roads

Mayor Wayne Brown and Auckland Council came in for special criticism over claims they went missing and were slow to react to the seriousness of the storm.

The council says it has now set up an improved standard operating procedure that on-duty staff and leaders can follow if they find themselves in unexpected emergencies, thus speeding up the response.

Auckland Council has also completed 19 out of 29 action plans identified around improving emergency leadership, planning and training, it said.

National transport agency Waka Kotahi and Auckland Transport were among the first teams to set up a response centre for the storm, given they already had a traffic centre operating to manage the Elton John concert planned for that night.

However Waka Kotahi came in for criticism after its team stopped sending out social media alerts to the public about the state of the roads.

Photos of inundated highways and roads, including one bus ploughing through floodwaters, also quickly went viral during the storm.

Auckland Transport, for its part, says it has made plans to ensure it provides faster, real-time alerts about road conditions in future emergencies and has better planning for opening alternate public transport and road accesses in emergencies.

It said its public transport operators have worked hard to move stranded commuters during the storm and that its roading contractors worked as quickly as possible to safely reopen roads.

Tragic firefighter deaths in Muriwai

Ken Cooper, from Fire and Emergency NZ’s service delivery design team, said his team were proud of their response to the “catastrophic and unprecedented” storm.

Every fire truck was dispatched as crews answered more than 700 calls for help between midday January 27 and 7am the next morning.

However, two firefighters would lose their lives days after the storm in a landslip.

“The tragic loss of our volunteer firefighters Craig Stevens and Dave van Zwanenberg at Muriwai Beach during Cyclone Gabrielle in February 2023 continues to remind us of the risks our firefighters can be exposed to,” Cooper says.

Fenz has subsequently been working to boost safety training and equipment available for crews to manage future landslides.

It has also established five specialist water rescue teams to increase “our ability to work safely around water”, he says.

Looking ahead

Councillor Hills acknowledges it’s possible to look around one year on from the floods and wonder what has changed.

“The wheels of government do take time,” he says.

But the council has overhauled its emergency response and been busy repairing and improving infrastructure.

The home buy-out scheme is now picking up steam and getting some “good feedback”, though Hills knows the families waiting are still in terrible situations.

The council has also been working on major projects, like those at Northcote, before the floods but now plans to tackle them faster.

However many tough conversations remain, such as potentially down-zoning parts of the city that regularly flood and working with private owners to build more natural “soak” points across Auckland.

To get there, continued support from the Government and public is needed, he said.

“The risk going forward is how do we keep focus on this stuff,” he said.

“We need to make a plan, we need to have those hard conversations with the community - they need to happen sooner rather than later.

“Otherwise, people and leaders do forget and move on.”