MORE CYCLONE STUFF*

 * Sorry about that.

Today has been sunny and warm with very little wind. It is in fact a typical Northland summer day which is so diametrically different than the previous four days.

I went for a walk around the neighbourhood and surveyed the cyclone damage - the fallen trees, collapsed sheds, blown down fences, sunk dinghies and boats and roading damage.

The gravel road at the end of our sealed road leading to the jetty is totally munted with at least four sections looking like this:

I feel sorry for the two households whose driveways run off this stretch of road. They will be unable to get a car in or out for quite some time.

I also feel sorry for the owners of the house that is perched at the edge of the bank above three slips that have come down onto the road:

This slip is on-going and any more downfall will result in the house being red-stickered.

I mentioned that a friend from tennis, Val who is 84, lost the roof to her house in the early hours of Monday morning.

The roofing iron and beams were ripped off and travelled, remarkably, about 80 metres from Whangarei Heads Road to the other side of a house in our street.

I talked to the owner of this house who was clearing up some of the damage. The roofing material scraped along the roof of their house just under the power lines, took out their fence, broke windows and landed between their property and the local village hall. It was lucky that no-one was killed or injured.

I invited Val to come and stay with us until she got the roof sorted but she will be staying with a daughter who doesn't live too far away. I'll get more information tomorrow at tennis if this nice weather stays.

If I do go to tennis I'll try again to get to my sister's house to check it out for damage. I guess we will be having a working bee at tennis because most of the large fence has been blown down.

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We were without power and internet on Monday for 12 hours.

Yesterday and most of today we have been without water supply. The council set up potable water trucks around the area for people to get fresh drinking water and advised that they didn't know how long the water outage would last. Doomsayers suggested a week. I had filed large tureens and pots with fresh water in advance of this, just in case which turned out to be a good idea. We filled buckets from a gushing stream going into the sea for filling the toilet cisterns. I was concerned however that if the outage lasted a few more days we don't have decent water containers to fetch water from the council truck. This afternoon I was all set to drive into town to find a place to buy large plastic water containers - 5/10/20 litre ones. I wasn't looking forward to this as I know that there would have been a run on them. I looked on-line for possible suppliers - Para Rubber, Bunnings, Mitre 10, The Warehouse etc. and was all set to go but tried the water tap one more time and bingo! We had water which is still on after a couple of hours. We now have water supply, electricity and internet although my cell-phone coverage is a bit patchy.

It shows how reliant we are on these things. I had charged up the battery torches before the power went off and, as said, filled some pots before the water went off but now I'll have to ensure in future that we have some clean and sturdy water containers. There is no doubt that we will see more of these storms this year and in the future. If so I might need to invest in a rainwater capture system and some kind of emergency generator. I'm not some sort of nutty survivalist but I think this time we dodged a bullet.