Severe weather is continuing to batter the top of the North Island as Cyclone Tam brings heavy rain and strong winds.<\/p>\n
The Auckland region is also affected by heavy rain and strong winds but its lines company, Vector Electricity, is refusing to reveal how many homes and businesses are without power.<\/p>\n
Its online map shows patches of unplanned outage from Te Hana to Ardmore.<\/p>\n
Network companies are reminding people to treat all downed electricity lines as live.<\/p>\n
Trees have fallen across power lines in places, but lines crews have been stood down until daylight because it is too dangerous for them to keep working.<\/p>\n
Fire and Emergency crews have attended at least 25 ‘natural event’ callouts since midnight – mainly in Northland, but some in Auckland.<\/p>\n
Kaikohe weathered 10 mm of rainfall between 2am and 3am alone, with humidity at 97 percent.<\/p>\n
That was significantly wetter than many neighbouring areas, with the next highest amount of rainfall coming in at 3.6mm during the same period, in Whang\u0101rei.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, winds of over 100km\/h have whipped Cape Reinga, Okahu Island and Hauraki Gulf.<\/p>\n
Forecasters are warning strong winds and heavy rain will intensify into Thursday, as Cyclone Tam sweeps south to other regions.<\/p>\n
MetService said it would keep referring to the weather system – technically an Ex-Tropical Cyclone – as Cyclone Tam, to ensure the message was clear that this was a serious storm.<\/p>\n
The centre of the weather system is expected to remain offshore, but extreme weather is still expected, with warnings and watches issued for many parts of the North Island and upper South Island.<\/p>\n
Northlanders should expect more strong wind, heavy rain and high swells from Thursday morning, with the possibility of thunderstorms and intense bursts of rainfall.<\/p>\n
Towards Friday, the storm will begin to arrive in Coromandel, Bay of Plenty and the north of the South Island.<\/p>\n
rnz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Severe weather is continuing to batter the top of the North Island as Cyclone Tam brings heavy rain and strong winds. The Auckland region is also affected by heavy rain and strong winds but its lines company, Vector Electricity, is refusing to reveal how many homes and businesses are without power. Its online map shows […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":13330,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13329","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=13329"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13331,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13329\/revisions\/13331"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}