Canterbury has had a wet spell, nothing new, also Wellington has had a southerly storm, “Climate Change ” is real and is coming to you.
What the purveyors of doomsday dramas do not tell you much, Christchurch is on the estuary wetlands of the Waimakariri, Avon and Heathcote rivers . Cripes the Deans Brothers did not stop until they reached the big timbers of Deans Bush to establish their homestead some ten miles inland from where they might well have descended to the swampy plains in the Heathcote Valley having crossed the Port Hills via the bridal track from Port Lyttelton

To have an understanding how Wellington sitting all set up for such an event as was the fodder for the climate alarmists of State TV, is primed for such weather as it was in 1968 when a series of rather dodgy decisions came together to end a link with the South Island with the sinking of the Lyttelton /Wellington ferry service with the catastrophic sinking of the last Ferry, TEV Wahine after it struck Barrett’s Reef. Of course that link was already under threat from increasing air links and the Railways Picton Wellington ferries that began some six years earlier.

Of course those who were able to comprehend that “Incident” that miraculously claimed only 53 lives, are now sixty years and older and unlikely to be involved in covering the storm for the increasingly incoherent MSM yesterday , so the Repeaters have zero understanding that 12 meter swells at Seatoun and Island Bay may not be actually evidence of the looming disaster causing untold mental trauma for those of more tender years.

Maybe it is just me but exactly what does having a production crew risking life and limb for the potential “if it bleeds it leads” drama that gave the Doomsters a real live home grown weather disaster instead of the long standing searching of global communications for evidence supporting the daily reminders we are doomed. Surely some footage from a roving Camera and a less dramatic commentary by one in a less challenging scene would suffice.

Yes this latest test from the weather gods is dramatic and unusual but has happened before.
One of the weather differences when moving to Wairarapa in 1980 was the southerly storms that lasted 12 to 24 hours in Canterbury had a propensity to last two and more days further North.
This latest storm delivering around 150 mm or six inches was a rare event here in Canterbury, it normally requires a much more Easterly powered event for such concentrated weather, but the always unpredictability of all weather will deliver events at odds with the norm, this was a little different.

For example the “Wahine Storm” prime energy came from a tropical cyclone coming down from the equatorial Pacific travelling down the Nation from the north while this latest was more local in origin.
Bola that smashed the east coast was a similar tracked delivery of destruction along with the more recent “Gabrielle” that hit Southern Gisborne and North / Central Hawkes Bay hardest.

This latest “rain event has generated much angst for Banks Peninsula with the only realistic road access to Akaroa and The Eastern Bays through Little River closed by an elevated in level Lake Forsyth, a body of water that runs alongside Hwy 75 from Birdlings Flat to “Big Creek” (a term of endearment for the township”. A lake increasingly closed by the shingle delivered to the Pacific by the Mighty Rakaia and swept north by the ocean to deliver the shingle bank that closes both Forsyth and Ellesmere, forming Birdlings Flat and The Kaitorete Spit recently in the news as a potential launch site for Rocket Labs.
As recent as a couple of hundred years ago Forsyth was open to the ocean at high tide to shallow draft vessels.

Could the messengers of State TV have reported the events in a more moderate vein, hell no this was far too good to pass up.