…but it pours, espe­cial­ly in Porirua today, caus­ing sud­den flood­ing and seri­ous dis­rup­tion.

I down­loaded the hourly rain­fall data from Greater Welling­ton’s site (a rather painful man­u­al process, but a big improve­ment from not long ago, when you could only get the charts as sta­t­ic images) and put togeth­er a quick graph. Here are cumu­la­tive rain­fall totals for today, for select­ed sta­tions in the region arranged rough­ly from north to south.

Wellington region rainfall for 20160505

Unfor­tu­nate­ly there’s no sta­tion in Porirua itself, but the one just upstream in Tawa received the great­est total. 60mm in a day is not a huge total in itself, but most of it came in two or three hours before 9am, peak­ing at a tor­ren­tial 20mm/hr. Met­Ser­vice’s radar caught the del­uge at its height:

Taupo Stream (just north of Plim­mer­ton) also caught a good 50mm, and I sus­pect that there were very localised falls in Porirua that were even high­er. I saw a few com­plaints on social media along the lines of “Typ­i­cal! A lit­tle bit of rain and the infra­struc­ture can’t han­dle it”, but when you get half a mon­th’s rain­fall in a cou­ple of hours, most drainage sys­tems would strug­gle to cope…especially in flood­plains and reclaimed mud­flats.