When it blows, it blows.

It won't be news to anyone from New Zealand that we've been having some pretty wild weather lately. This culminated in Greymouth exactly a week ago with some of the worst winds locals have ever experienced. 160km + winds ripped through the town - and especially up on the hill in Cobden where we live.

Although we got off relatively lightly, it was still pretty scary, and we decided to evacuate from our house in the dark. The kids found it all rather exciting, but watching sheets of roofing iron flying down the road as you're evacuating your house isn't something I'd like to repeat too often.

We stayed the night at friends (thanks Tim and Niki) and then went back home the next morning to survey the damage. Fortunately the rain that was forecast didn't eventuate until late the next day, so there was no water damage to worry about - and a quick lesson in tiling a roof (cheers Eric - aka Spiderman, and foreman Rob) meant that we got the tiles back in place and tied down before the rain came. All in all pretty lucky really.

We had patches of tiles like this come loose all over the house - but luckily none of them dropped off the roof and smashed, so we were able to fit them back into place and tie them down (the next day of course).

The neighbours Pohutakawa tree didn't survive the battering though... so neither did our fence!


We used to have a tunnel house - one of the selling points for buying the house in the first place. Oh well, maybe we didn't need one after all?


Houses up and down our street fared much worse than we did - some lost their entire roof and are dealing with water damage now. The clean up continues, and we are all just thankful that no one was seriously injured. Hopefully one of those 'once in a lifetime' storms that won't come again in a hurry?

And BTW, what was the only thing I took with me when we evacuated the house (apart from my family of course)? You guessed it - my camera gear. I'm not completely stupid! :-)