What a weekend, eh? What a weekend.

How about those Warriors overwhelming against the Storm, winning for the first time for a while in Melbourne?  

It was a great watch.

It was a bad weekend for South Island rugby teams, but a big crowd for the Chiefs in Rotorua. Maybe Super Rugby's getting its mojo back. There was a crowd there.

And, the Masters in Augusta was simply aesthetically beautiful. What a gorgeous golf course. The golf itself scintillating, still going on.

Coachella was live streamed on YouTube, so Sunday at 5.30 pm. I tuned in for David Byrne and his uplifting celebration of humanity. The concert was magnificent. It was a good watch.

And, a Kiwi in a Toyota won in Taupō in the Supercars and, for the first time, the Supercars saw a cancelled day because of the tropical cyclone.

And in fact, the tropical cyclone was the big story of the weekend. It meant a weekend for hunkering down, watching cars, watching David Byrne, watching Justin Bieber, believe it or not, watching golf and all sorts of things, and a bit of reading.

The storm came, and the storm did its own thing. We were warned five days beforehand, and some saw that as overkill. But I think the storm actually delivered.

Today, Civil Defence is reiterating that we should treat every event with respect, and I think we did.

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Where I was, Saturday was fine, warm and windy. So I motorcycled to Ōnehunga Domain to watch Takapuna versus North Shore in the North Shore Prems, and I saw working bees out sandbagging, and I saw people clearing drains in preparation. The storm arrived, but it wandered east, sparing Northland and Auckland. So those sandbaggers did it for nothing, but there we go.

But, then the storm belted Coromandel before thrashing the Bay of Plenty and then turning inland and beating up the central North Island. It was a major event. Maybe not where you are. But it sure as hell made it to Coromandel and the Bay of Plenty. 10,000 people lost power, slips closed roads, and areas were cut off.

Now, I have a family bach on the Coromandel Peninsula, and I have travelled down twice this year to make sure it's safe, but I didn't go this weekend. The last two times I went down, including just a fortnight ago, I ended up trapped by flooding on State Highway 25 at Hikuai. That happened again this weekend, so had I gone down, it would have been doubtful that I would have been here today.

Whitianga, Whangamatā, Tairua, all cut off because of flooding at Hikuai.

This weekend saw more than 220 millimetres fall on the Pinnacles, which is the top point of the Coromandel  ranges. It hits up there, then the water flows down the Kauaeranga River on the Thames side and the Tairua River on the east. And it's that catchment that strands settlements like Whitianga and Tairua because the river, Tairua River, bursts its bank. It did it again this weekend.

The last time I went down there, like I say, just a fortnight ago, I got stranded, and then I came back and told the newsroom about it, and a bloke there said, well, you know, maybe it's time to abandon the coast, to give up on it, because it keeps on being flooded and closed down, and the roads keep being destroyed. And when he said that, his name might have been Mike, I replied, look, there's far too many retired lawyers in Whitianga to ever let the road be closed down or the place to be abandoned because of a bit of flooding at Hikuai. That's not going to happen.

But there is a conversation we need to have.

The storms are powerful, but they are no more powerful than in the past, and ask Ian Wishart, he'll show you that the worst storms we've had were back in the 1930s and the turn of the 1900s. But the real problem these days is their regularity.

Like I say, every fortnight, my place has been cut off by flooding. Super soaking land causes flash flooding and slips and closes the road. And it's happened time and time and time and time again, unlike it used to back in the old days.

So the question we have is, if we are to keep living in the regularly affected places like the Coromandel or East Cape, there's obviously a need to further strengthen their infrastructure so that they don't close. But the question there is, are we prepared to spend the money to increase our resilience, to make these roads unfloodable? Or is it time to tell the good people of the Coromandel and the East Cape that this is the downside of living in these far flung and vulnerable places.

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