South's big freeze far from finished

Warren Barton, of Connectics, replaces broken power pole arms near Dunsandel, southwest of Christchurch. Picture / Simon Baker

More cold weather is on the way for snow-bound Canterbury, still thawing out from Monday's paralysing blizzard.

Thousands of rural properties remained without electricity for the third day in a row yesterday and lines companies warned that some more remote homes were likely to have no power until early next week.

As local authorities continued the clean-up, MetService forecasters predicted more cold, snowy weather.

Brief spells of northwesterly winds were expected overnight and today, but a frigid southerly flow was expected to spread over the south and east of the South Island from tomorrow.

In Canterbury and Otago, snow showers should be mostly light and brief, but the snow was likely to be more prolonged in Southland, said the Met Service.

Another cold southerly outbreak was expected on Sunday.

At least a dozen schools remained closed around Canterbury yesterday and all early childhood education centres in South Canterbury were shut, said Ministry of Education spokesman Vince Cholewa.

Dozens more had been closed at the height of the snowstorm on Monday, and again on Tuesday.

Schools were closed mainly because of the difficulty of getting to them on snow-bound roads. In some cases trees had been felled on school properties and snow-laden gutters had collapsed.

Local authority and Civil Defence staff yesterday organised a fleet of 4WD vehicles to check isolated communities for any urgent needs.

Environment Canterbury emergency management planner Jon Mitchell said local authorities were concerned that they could not make contact with some outlying communities which had been virtually cut off from the outside world.

Power supplies were still unavailable in some areas and both landline and cellphone links were non-existent in places. The Mackenzie Basin and Hakataramea Valley in South Canterbury were worst affected.

Mr Mitchell said the main area of concern now was continued power cuts.

"If it continues, and for some areas it will carry on for some time, there may well be some welfare needs," he said.

Civil Defence staff, particularly in South Canterbury, were attempting to get out into the community to assess needs.

Mr Mitchell said roads were opening gradually in most areas and communications were slowly improving. Farmers, mainly in the high country where snow was deepest, were beginning to bring out stock that had been trapped by deep snow drifts.

Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry staff and Federated Farmers were co-ordinating stock relief efforts.

Several helicopters were now working in areas isolated by snow, either supporting power line repairs or attending to stock, Mr Mitchell said.

"This provides an opportunity for people in isolated areas to contact or convey their situation back to authorities," he said.

In hard-hit Timaru, Civil Defence incident controller Mark Griffioen said restoring power in rural areas remained difficult because of the huge amount of snow clogging roads - in places up to 1m deep - and bulldozers, rather than graders, were needed to clear it.

Mr Griffioen said Alpine Energy had now advised it would probably be "into next week" before power was restored to the entire district.

Some individual urban properties had been damaged and they would need to be inspected before being reconnected.

Timaru District Council environmental health manager David Vince said extended power cuts raised new health issues.

Sewage effluent pumps serving septic tank systems would be unable to discharge effluent into drainage systems. Alarms connected to such systems to warn of any problems would also be inoperable.

Residents of houses with such systems were advised to conserve water by showering or bathing less often, using disposable cutlery, taking laundry elsewhere and by not flushing their toilets unless it was absolutely necessary.

Cafe steps up to plate at Twizel

Meals were on the house at Twizel's Hunter's Bar and Cafe as local residents came together to deal with their near two-day power outage.

Cheryl Tissier, who co-owns the cafe, said the restaurant was the only establishment in the town that could prepare hot meals during the outage. She and her staff worked overtime as food was prepared and delivered to the area's elderly and those living alone.

"It was an emergency so you can't really charge people in situations like that," said Ms Tissier.

The town, with a population of about 1500, had power restored late on Tuesday night after a blackout at 4.23am on Monday. "Everyone just lost track of time because it was pitch black - you would think it was 11pm but really it was 7pm, that's how dark it was," said Ms Tissier. "It's been pretty chaotic, but the kids love it."

Despite the inconvenience and potential danger, Ms Tissier said the outage had brought out the best in the local community. Fire and conservation workers checked on local residents.