Wellington Flooding After Record Rain: New Zealand Capital Faces Widespread Damage and Search for Missing Man Continues

New Zealand has declared a state of emergency in its capital city Wellington as torrential rain and flash flooding drenched the country’s North Island.

Wellington received a record 77mm (3in) of rain in less than an hour on Monday, said mayor Andrew Little.

The body of a man who was swept away after severe flooding tore through his home in New Zealand’s capital has been found, police confirmed on Wednesday, as the city picked up the pieces after widespread damage.

Philip Sutton was looking after a property for his sister in Karori, in Wellington’s west, when a torrent of flood water smashed through it early on Monday.

Search and rescue teams had been scouring the area but were forced to pause operations when Tuesday brought further torrential rain.

In a media briefing, police said Sutton was found some distance from his car just after midday on Wednesday.

There was a “substantial distance” between the car and where Sutton was found, they said.

“The family are aware that we have located Phillip, so as you can imagine they are now moving to that privacy space so they can manage what they need to manage,” Inspector Fleur de Bes said.

Speaking to RNZ, Insp Dean Silvester said the search in the semi-rural area had been challenging.

Flood debris was found in trees more than a metre off the ground, he said.

“So that gives some indication of the ferocity.”

Wellington was placed under a rare state of emergency on Monday after the city experienced rainfall totals that nearly tripled monthly averages.

More than 70mm of rain fell in one hour in parts of southern Wellington – the highest on record for the city, Metservice said.

Footage online shows vehicles submerged, trees uprooted and houses hit by landslides.

Local authorities advised residents to hunker down, with rain forecast for the next day and a half.

Some flights at Wellington Airport have been cancelled and several schools have shut their campuses.

More than a dozen people have been evacuated while a 60-year-old man in the Karori suburb has been reported missing.

No fatalities have been reported so far.

This series of flash floods comes less than a week after Cyclone Vaianu swept through the North Island last weekend.

Research over the years have shown that climate change has made extreme weather events, including floods, more common and more intense around the world.

The wild weather continues. We’ve had flooding, slips and evacuations… The flooding has been strong enough to move cars, and many manhole covers have been lifted,” Little said in a video published on his Facebook page.

In the suburb of Kingston, a resident told Radio New Zealand (RNZ) that he had tried to escape on the back of his neighbour’s motorbike after a landslide buried a nearby road in the early hours of Monday.

“It’s definitely a big event,” he said. “You wouldn’t have wanted to be under it, it wouldn’t have been survivable.”

Another resident in the suburb of Mornington said his garden had been “inundated with water, you couldn’t see the grass or anything”. There was a “huge deluge, flow, river in fact, flowing through the garden”, he told RNZ.