Strong winds at Wellington Airport have caused 15 flights coming in and out of the capital to be cancelled, and hundreds in the city are without power.<\/p>\n
Most flights had been able to operate normally, but wind gusts were causing landing difficulties for some flights, the airport said.<\/p>\n
In a statement, Air New Zealand said flight NZ417 was returned to Auckland after it was unable to land from gusty weather, and customers would be accommodated on the next available service.<\/p>\n
Customers were advised to check their flights on the Air New Zealand app and website for updates.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, almost 250 properties were without power in the capital.<\/p>\n
Crews were working to fix the fault after the outage happened at 11.30am, affecting more than 20 streets in Petone.<\/p>\n
Wellington Electricity said the outage was caused by damage to its overhead network equipment.<\/p>\n
The power was estimated to be restored by 5pm.<\/p>\n
MetService has forecast a heavy rain watch and a strong wind watch with gusts expected to reach up to 100km\/h for Wairarapa, Wellington and the Marlborough Sounds through to 4pm on Thursday.<\/p>\n
The north-to-northwest winds may approach severe gale in exposed places, it said.<\/p>\n
Heavy rain watches were also in place for the Westland ranges and the headwaters of the Canterbury lakes until 9pm.<\/p>\n
Earlier, there was a strong wind watch for the Canterbury high country which expired at 3pm.<\/p>\n
~RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Strong winds at Wellington Airport have caused 15 flights coming in and out of the capital to be cancelled, and hundreds in the city are without power. Most flights had been able to operate normally, but wind gusts were causing landing difficulties for some flights, the airport said. In a statement, Air New Zealand said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":11202,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11201"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11203,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11201\/revisions\/11203"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}