Flooding in Christchurch

Fantastic news: My husband received the results from the biopsy. It says No signs of cancer. A stone fell of our shoulders. It was some rare condition which is treatable. We celebrated with cake and wine. I am allowed one glass.

We are now focussed on the heavy rainfall which has caused severe problems for many people as  gardens and roads are flooded.

It has been raining all week. On Wednesday they predicted the worst snowstorm ever. They also predicted 6 degrees Celsius. Snow will not form if the ground temperature is about 5 degrees Celsius so I was not too worried. The people here are not used to snow so they ran to the shops and stocked their cupboards with groceries. When I went to the supermarket after work, bread and milk were sold out.  The snow storm was supposed to come on Thursday night and than postponed till Friday. On Friday the roads were deserted. There was a lot of snow in the rest of the South  Island. Tekapo was snowed in and closed off from the world for 48 hours.
Christchurch  had only sleet snow. I talked to a man from Romania. He said " In my  country there is snow for 3 months and life goes on. Here all the schools close and life stops, because people are not prepared for it"
Some schools had to close this time though because of the flooding. Only 40% of  storm water drainage pipes and 25% of waste water pipes have been fixed since the earth quake. This intensified the problems.

I went out this morning and the roads were full of holes and many were flooded. I drove home over Hendersons Road, which is close to us and I nearly got stuck as the water was knee deep and the car protested but luckily it kept slowly moving forwards.
The Avon river already flooded the roads but the Heathcote river is not far off as you see on the pictures below. Tomorrow it might get a bit better.

The banks of the Heathcote river overflown



Heathcote river

A day after the rains: Hoon Hay flooded