STURM UND DRANG

Finally, a shout out to all those readers affected by the recent weather events – and we’ve been on the receiving end of quite a few ‘events’ this past month or so. Here in Te Aroha, we’ve experienced a few minor earthquakes, both of which shook most residents out of bed in the early morning hours, while heavy rain saw the Waihou River breaking its banks, flooding a few of the lower parts of town and transforming the wetlands on the approach to the main bridge across the river, from marshy paddocks to ‘Lake Te Aroha.’

However, I didn’t miss out on the big Far North and Auckland ‘wet’ that kicked off Auckland Anniversary weekend as I got caught in the storm driving back home from Whangarei. To say the weather was awful would be an understatement, and I was lucky to drive through the Brynderwens before slips closed the road. Fortunately, I was driving a borrowed 4X4 but even so the five-hour drive from Whangarei to Te Aroha was quite definitely the worst drive I’ve ever experienced.

As I was splashing through surface flooding, negotiating torrents of mud flowing across the road and dealing with crazy drivers, I was taken back to 1988 and Cyclone Bola. At the time that tropical cyclone hit the top half of the North Island, I was taking part in an MG rally in the Dairy Flat region. The rally was called off at the midway point as the wind and rain began to take hold, but I still recall one of the competitors with a car full of water after the flood he’d driven through turned out to be a lot deeper that he’d thought. On that occasion I was co-driving in a Sunbeam Alpine, perhaps not the best vehicle in which to tackle such wild and woolly weather, but we made it back home without further incident.