Wet enough for ya?
It was a terrible summer and the seasons that followed have been wet, wetter and wetter still. David Burroughs reports on the long, big wet of 2017 and what it has done to Taranaki.
It’s raining on the drive out to Greg and Hannah Topless’ Strathmore farm, and the paddocks, drains and rivers beside the road are filled with water. That’s the way it’s been for most of the season.
‘‘I don’t remember farming through anything like it,’ Greg says.
‘‘You always have spells of it but normally it might be two weeks or something and then the next two weeks are good.
‘‘There’s doesn’t seem to have been a good spell at all in amongst it.’’
He’s not the only one feeling like there is no respite.
As some places reach their yearly average of rain with more than three months of the year left, the effects of the drawn out winter and soggy spring are starting to show.
From builders waiting to catch up on work to school students itching to play tag outside, almost everyone is looking forward to the return of fine weather.
But even after the rain stops and the paddocks dry out, the ramifications of the prolonged wet weather will still be felt.
‘‘The effects of damage we’re doing in the paddocks and the pasture, it’s just never going to grow as well as it could have for the rest of the season,’’ Greg says.
‘‘So therefore less grass, less milk sort of thing, you have to buy extra feed in to plug the gap.’’
It’s not entirely a case of short-term memory making this year feel like the wettest there ever was. Every single one of the Taranaki Regional Council’s (TRC) monitoring sites received abovenormal rainfall between January and August with five of them reaching between 97 and 98 per cent of their yearly average rainfall with a third of the year to go.
The same weather farmers have been working through has also had an impact on our schools. Students are stuck inside the classrooms and corridors all days and the results are exactly as you might expect.
‘‘They’re just far more on edge and it just increases as the days multiply,’’ Waitara High School teacher Matarahi Skipper says.
With more than 300 students at the school, things can get crowded if they’re not able to get out onto the school grounds for a break so Skipper, a first year teacher, began putting on a movie in the school hall during wet lunch breaks in an effort to give the students somewhere to go.
‘‘Sometimes they can get a bit antsy, if you’ve got all the students in the corridors there’s just multiple people bumping into each other and everyone’s in a mood anyway.
‘‘So the more we can offer some more activities or things for them to do, it just lightens that congestion in the hallways and gives them a little bit of respite.’’
Feeling down during bad weather isn’t uncommon, Senior Lecturer at Massey University Dr Joanne Taylor says, and it can range from mild winter blues to a cases of seasonal affective disorder, a serious type of depression compounded during the winter months when sunlight is limited.
‘‘I think it is a pretty typical thing for people to get a bit frustrated, a bit low, a bit blue,’’ she says.
‘‘People can get a little bit low through winter but most people cope with that reduction in light exposure.’’
It’s not doom and gloom for everyone around the region, with those offering indoor activities seeing an increase in patronage when the weather turns bad.
Event Cinemas New Plymouth and the Bowlarama bowling alley both say they saw more customers during wet periods, while gyms also had more people coming in when the weather turned bad.
Builders have also been stuck working inside but while most have been finding ways to keep themselves busy with interior work, they are expecting a rush of residential builds once the weather fines up.
‘‘What it’s going to mean is when the good weather does actually come in, everybody is absolutely going to be flat
‘‘I don’t remember farming through anything like it.’’
Greg Topless - Strathmore farmer
out,’’ New Plymouth ITM’s manager of trades Michael Knuckey says.
That would create a backlog, which was causing concern among those in the profession as it could push customers to turn to unskilled workers.
"All the builders and the sub trades, all the professional ones will be absolutely snowed and the danger is that the retail customer that wants a renovation done, they may get a job that isn’t quite to the standard that one of the professional bodies will do for you because of the labour shortage,’’ he says.
The backlog of work for builders has a carry-on effect on other trades such as painters, electricians and roofers who will also be delayed from starting if the builders are behind schedule.
It’s not just building trades. Roading contractors are also having a frustrating year.
In August a large culvert south of New Plymouth suffered major damage in a overnight downpour, the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) has recorded an increase in potholes on major roads and the Stratford District Council has decided to close of parts off Wingrove Rd for a number of weeks to undertake emergency works. All add to the list of things making it challenging to keep the region’s roading network up to scratch.
NZTA transport system manager Ross I’Anson says they try to get to the pot holes as soon as they can but that doesn’t always fix the problem.
‘‘Pothole repairs just do not work if they are carried out in wet weather,’’ he says.
In New Plymouth a massive downpour in July helped surfer Logan Gieni find his 15 minutes of fame with a short video of him surfing down Gill St but for the most part the rain has just caused trouble.
While the city’s Huatoki Plaza and Puke Ariki underpass would usually be closed an average of three or four times a year due to flooding, they have been closed seven times so far this year.
During one such storm, the river rose so high it washed a Portacom building off the Puke Ariki Landing and out to sea.
Bowling greens and sports fields have both been affected by the weather, with most of the football season hindered by rain from start to finish, and two weekends where almost all games were called off except for matches in Kaponga and Eltham, Central Football’s Taranaki operations manage Aroha Lynch says.
‘‘In the entire last five seasons, only one other weekend has all senior football been entirely called off; 20 June, 2015,’’ she says.
‘‘I can even remember the date, it was so rare.’’
The New Plymouth District Council has also been held up by the wet and are currently waiting for a gap in the weather to pick up on maintenance, mowing and renovations on sports grounds, infrastructure manager David Langford says.
On Friday council staffed asked people to be patient if they were unhappy with the grass length at their local park, as the wet weather meant grass was growing faster than usual while hampering maintenance efforts on the 283 hectares of grass the council usually manages.
‘‘Once the rain stops and the days get longer, the grass will grow quicker. The longer the grass, the longer it takes to mow,’’ NPDC Parks and Open Spaces Manager Stuart Robertson says.
‘‘Coastal grasses like kikuyu also start to take over and these species can dull the blades and slow the mower down.’’
More rain falling on farmland also means more runoff into streams, says Taranaki Regional Council’s director of environment quality Gary Bedford, which in turn had a ‘‘significant adverse effect’’ on a rivers’ ‘‘swimmability’’, or its bacteriological quality.
For a river to be deemed ‘‘swimmable’’ by the Ministry for the Environment, it needed its highest testing to be below 1,200 E coli per 100 millilitres.
‘‘Over July and August, many of our rivers have had levels of E coli in the range 2,000-13,000 per 100 millilitres, or up to over ten times higher than the Government’s criterion,’’ Bedford says.
But with more westerly flows hitting New Zealand’s west coast and more moisture in the warmer air due to global warming, the region could expect it to get wetter in years to come, says NIWA climate scientist Nava Fedaeff.
‘‘We are expecting more rain in total to fall as we get warmer but also right across the country, there’ll be more extreme events.
‘‘Now you get 100mm of rain in a day, in a future climate that might be something like 125mm, so basically even your extreme events, you just get more rain and that’s just a lot to do with more moisture in the air when you have a warm atmosphere.’’ But she says it wasn’t a significantly wetter winter than usual, it could just feel like it was.
‘‘If it’s nice outside Monday to Friday but then it’s wet on the weekend you think the whole month was wet.’’