Keeping a weather eye...

The heavy rain over the weekend kept the Horizons and Wanganui District Council teams on watch. The Horizons EOC was activated for a few hours on Saturday afternoon to monitor and assess the Whanganui catchment. Early forecasts suggested that we could be in for a flood in Wanganui. As peak river height times got closer the model runs were lower than originally thought and the team stood down.

The Horizons river level alerting system made hundreds of phone calls over the weekend notifying people as the rivers rose through alarm levels. The system worked well despite needing a re-boot part way through the event.

The new Whanganui Flood Action Plan and automated flood forecasting system were both tested for the first time . The river levels only required the Plan to be activated to about 1/2 way. We have spotted a couple of minor adjustments we can make but on the whole the Plan is pretty good. The modelling worked well for the upper end of the catchment but still requires a little massaging for the lower reaches. The experts will be on to this over the next few weeks.

I think we played it fairly cautiously this time, but that provides me with a lot of comfort that the team can do what we have all committed to in the Plan.