AUCKLAND – Residents have been forced to swim to safety from flooded homes in New Zealand after Cyclone Gabrielle lashed the country’s north.
The government announced a national state of emergency on Tuesday due to the storm’s devastation – just the third time in history it has done so.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins says the disaster is New Zealand’s biggest weather event in a century.
Officials said at least 225,000 people were without power on Tuesday.
The storm’s damage has been most extensive in coastal communities on the far north and east coast of the North Island – with areas Hawke’s Bay, Coromandel and Northland among the worst hit.
Nearly a third of New Zealand’s 5.1 million population live in affected regions.
Local media have reported that some residents in Hawke’s Bay had to swim through bedroom windows to escape as waters flooded their homes. People in the area have been warned they could be without power for weeks.
Aerial pictures of flooded regions showed people stranded on rooftops waiting for rescue.
The vast scale of the damage includes uprooted trees, bent street lights and poles, and row after row of flooded homes.
In Auckland, more than 100 people had also fled to evacuation centres overnight, officials said.
“The severity and the damage that we are seeing has not been experienced in a generation,” Hipkins said on Tuesday. “We are still building a picture of the effects of the cyclone as it continues to unfold. But what we do know is the impact is significant and it is widespread.”
Declaring the national state of emergency on Tuesday morning, the Minister for Emergency Management, Kieran McAnulty, described the storm as “unprecedented”.
The emergency order enables the government to streamline its response to the disaster. It has been applied to the Northland, Auckland, Tairawhiti, Tararua, Bay of Plenty, Waikato and Hawke’s Bay regions.
New Zealand has only previously declared a national state of emergency on two occasions – during the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and following the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.
The government has attributed the scale of the disaster to climate change. (BBC)
