Did someone put the thermometer in the freezer or something. And check out the windchill -15C and 7 layers of clothing needed… quite literally off the chart.

All week we have been promised the first fine weather weekend since May.

Well all morning it has been raining!

I was meant to go for a walk or tramp early this morning but that hasn’t happened.

Fine weather. Fine weekend. What an oxymoron.

Check out these two photos from the Mount Ruapehu website.

They are chairlifts buried in nearly four meters of snow. It is just nuts! I am hoping to go skiing again on the trip back up to Auckland.

Okay this photo is old but I have only just downloaded photos from my mobile phone to my computer.

This a photo of very thick fog in Auckland on May 16.

I am meant to be going skiing this Friday. But the weather is not playing its part. To gamble and head down anyway or wait a few more weeks. That is thy question?

I am a bit late in blogging this because I was away. But these were the conditions that I had to contend with when heading to the airport last Wednesday morning as a second large storm hit.

A bridge on SH17 between the Albany township and the Albany Tavern was underwater earlier today but reopened by 6.20am.

All lanes of Oteha Valley Road were flooded on the eastern side of the motorway but the road was passable, police said.

Now there is absolutely no denying that the storm that has hit us during the last two days has been particularly nasty, however, one thing that is getting to me is the way the media blow it up, and the way in which the general public then go into panic mode. I had a friend telling me that the motorway was closed and they shouldn’t be driving because there are slips and stuff. The irony here is that the motorway was never closed and the person couldn’t explain to me how you could get a slip in the middle of central Auckland where there are no hills to slip.

Coming back to the one in 10 year storm idea. Compare these two police media release pages. The first is for yesterday. The second is for July 10 2007. One year ago. Where we got hit by a very similar storm which took out power up here for two days. 48 hours. Not 3. And that was a year ago, not 10.

26 July 2008:

10 July 2007:

At first I was laughing at this press release by the NZ Police which was released in the middle of yesterday’s storm.

***Urgent Media Release***

There have been reports in the Media about the evacuation of Whangaparaoa.

There is NO Evacuation of Whanagaparaoa.

However, I think I may have no have worked out where the confussion arised from. At 10.30am the Whakapapa Ski Field at Ruapehu was evacuated due to the storm. Reading more about it you can see why:

Between 10am and 10:40am the wind speed went from 0 to 100kph and it’s now sitting at over 200kph. Our extremely hardy road crew are currently out being blasted by wind and snow as they fit chains onto all vehicles to get the public safely down the road.

Now I can imagine that the media would of probably just confussed the word Whakapapa with the word Whangarparaoa quite easily. One is a ski field on Ruapehu which often gets hits by snow storms. The other is a peninsula north of Auckland with lots of homes on it. Given the storm would of been bad at both areas a mix up in words is not supprising at all.