As we approach two weeks since the Auckland floods, the extent of the damage is coming clear.

There were hundreds of little land slips like in the picture above. The water in the bay remains murky and probably full of s**t from all the sewage overflows. Only a few people actually died, which is good, but dozens of homes will be torn down and thousands more are seriously damaged. Lots of cars written off. It’s still unknown how much damage to the sewer and water systems. The residents of one nearby area seem to have gotten a bad tummy bug and suspect their water is contaminated.

Here’s another shot of the tennis court in Little Shoal Bay. The Bowling Club is redoing the floor… with real plywood this time instead of the MDF that was in there before. It’s surprising that it was ever allowable to use that MDF in a building built on piling above a tidal marsh. Probably it wasn’t.

I found this informative timeline of how the storm developed… it was a convergence of multiple factors that brought us so much rain.

This week’s earthquake in Turkey is a reminder — if any was needed — that this storm was No Big Deal. But that’s only a little comfort to the people affected. And we have another cyclone heading our way this weekend which has the potential to be just as bad… ugh!

The official Auckland reporting station got something like 10” of rain on Friday. In our neighborhood, the total was more like 12” according to some amateur meteorologists. Our driveway turned back into the stream it once was. But luckily our house sits out of the path so no damage to us.

Lots of friends and neighbors had their basements get wet. We know one person whose ground-level apartment was chest deep underwater, and her car was completely submerged. Yuck! The bowling / pétanque club took on close to a foot of water, so we went down and helped clean up.

There were a lot of mudslides, and with so many houses perched on hillsides or next to cliff edges, the damage will be costly. In the shot above, that house is a lot closer to the edge of the cliff than it used to be, and the public tennis court is out of service for the foreseeable. Surely this flood will reignite the discussion about letting the whole Little Shoal Bay park complex go back to marshy wetlands.

We’ve lived through floods before, one-day events like this as well as the big Midwest floods of 1993 and 1995. People will recover and rebuild. But it will be hard, and it will eat up so much of the financial and mental breathing room for affected families and the whole city over the next couple of years… instead of doing whatever was next on the list, our efforts will step back down the hierarchy of needs ladder by a step or two. It’s a shame, although I think unavoidable with this many people living in this particular place. Of course drainage systems could be improved, but the cost of truly flood-proofing all the houses and roads in Auckland would be unacceptable.