Early Learning School

Senior Room

Kia ora! This week, the Senior tamariki have been focusing on the letter “p.” The children have been engaging in activities that involve the formation of the letter and sound.

1HOC - Bryan Zhao for working hard at his sight words and reading.

1AND - Marco Meng for a positive attitude towards learning.

1BTR - Queena Jia for settling to work quickly and quietly.

2CAR - Allison Wang for getting 100% in Basic Facts level 3 and 100% in spelling.

2SHA - Amber Wang for working hard on reading responses.

2GLC - Winston Lan for working diligently in class.

3ZOU - Matilda Townshend for writing a character description with interesting language.

3RIC - Sofia Onodera Menezes for settling well into ACG Sunderland and 3RIC

4SMI - Simon Wang for a positive attitude – he is always smiling and willing to help others.

4RYN -Yomal Navarante for great PAT results achieved.

5TRE - Jason Zhang for having a positive attitude towards all his learning.

5KIM - Ethan Wo for keeping his books neat and completing each task.

5CHE - Nicole Patterson for asking questions when she is unsure.

6PIR - Angela Zhou for her amazing effort finding words for homework.

6HAS - Kingsley Lin for a fantastic effort in all subject areas.

Primary House Shield Tong

Week 7 Assembly

Eason Sun – 3RIC

Lower Primary Trophy Winner

The Catastrophic Start to 2023

Just at the end of January and February, 2023, and we have already had circumstances beyond our control; what a disastrous start to the year. We presumed the worst was behind us, but 2023 is astounding us yet again. I’ll be talking about some of these natural disasters in slightly more detail.

Let’s start with the flooding. The first month of the year was treating us well, but decided to end with a bang! On the 27th of January, the upper part of the North Island suffered catastrophic floods, caused by heavy rainfall. Auckland was the most significantly affected, especially West Auckland and the North Shore. According to NIWA, an entire Summer’s worth of rain fell within this one day, which will be remembered as one of Auckland’s worst floods in modern history. Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson stated that the event was “New Zealand's costliest non-earthquake event ever.” Landslides occurred, online school for a couple days, cars were flooded, houses were wrecked, the Auckland International Airport was closed for a week; damage was tragic and widespread.

And when the earth decided that we hadn’t suffered enough, she hit us with Cyclone Gabrielle. This cyclone not only affected New Zealand, but also parts of Australia and Vanuatu. Unfortunately, there was one firefighter whose life was taken in the cyclone, in Muriwai. He was investigating a flooded house when a landslide occurred, and he was missing for a couple of days before being found buried under the house. The loss of was one of the greatest tragedies caused by Cyclone Gabrielle.

Once again, we had online school, this time for slightly longer. Hawkes Bay, Bay of Islands, parts of Auckland, Taranaki and many more places were affected by Cyclone Gabrielle, and councils are working hard to help deploy engineers to assess affected houses and infrastructure. Many temporary shelters have been made for families whose houses were completely flooded, or are in danger of collapsing. The NZ army jumped into the crisis for extra support to help the people of New Zealand. Auckland Airport had the worst closure in the history of the airport; domestic and international flights were cancelled and passengers already in the airport weren’t allowed to exit, and had to spend a few days inside the airport. There was even one instance where an Emirates flight departed from Dubai headed to Auckland and had to take a 180 degree turn halfway during the flight back to Dubai.

As stated by Prime Minister Chris Hipkins: the cost of recovery is estimated to be a whopping 13 billion dollars! It will be challenging to reconstruct major infrastructure damages due to shortage of construction workers; it could take up to a year to completely recover Auckland, and bring us back to the stable state we were in. Insurance companies are full of clients needing money for their cars and homes, after the hefty amount they’ve been paying every month. All that money the insurance companies had flowing in, is now gone. Insurance companies are sure to increase prices after what has been a major loss for them.

And to continue the trend of random natural disasters, on the 15th of February at 7:38pm a 6.1 magnitude earthquake occurred near the capital city of Wellington. The centre of the earthquake was 50km from the town of Paraparaumu on the south-western coast of the North Island. And just to end the whole February natural disasters theme, we had a nice “light” rain on the 24th of February.

This has definitely been a rough start to 2023. Hopefully the best of this year is yet to come, and we’ve got through the worst. It’s a hard time for North Islanders, but now that it’s mostly over, it’s about NZ working together to rebuild.

By Akarsh Shankar, Year 9

Auckland’s Summer Weather

So, it’s been raining lately. We have had at least two instances of very heavy rain in the past few weeks.

First, on January 27th, an atmospheric river spanning the Pacific Ocean was pushed into New Zealand by the tropical depression called 06F. What does that mean? An atmospheric river is a long, thin “river” of concentrated cloud water, that can span many thousands of kilometres, sometimes across oceans. This stream of heavy rain clouds was not initially directed at New Zealand, but when a tropical depression (a tropical storm too small to be called a cyclone) moved south from the Tasman Sea, toward New Zealand, it “pushed” the atmospheric river into our country.

The result was quite powerful. According to Metservice, in 34 hours, 299.5 millimetres of rain fell on Albert Park. $1 Billion dollars of property damages (the costliest storm in New Zealand History, at the time). What could top that?

On February 8th, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology upgraded the rating of Tropical Depression 14U to a Category 1 Tropical Storm and named the storm “Gabrielle”. Over the next few days, the storm would move to the west of the Australian State of Queensland and move across the Tasman Sea toward New Zealand. Vanuatu and New Caledonia were mildly affected by the passing of the storm to their East, with a village heavily damaged in Vanuatu. The cyclone then passed directly over Norfolk Island, on February 11th, and at that time had been upgraded to a Category 2 Tropical Storm. Winds in excess of 140 km/h were recorded. The island was prepared, and a shelter had already been established before the storm hit. No significant damages were recorded on the island.

On the 11th of February, the Storm was downgraded to a Subtropical Cyclone, after having peaked at Category 3 Tropical Storm. On the 12th, the storm made landfall on Northland. Heavy rain, high winds, storm surges, landslides, flooding, power cuts, and more damages occurred. The highest recorded rainfall for the storm was in the Gisborne area, with 488 millimetres of rain for the single storm. Many habitations were evacuated throughout the North Island. Hawkes Bay was the most severely affected region. The now infamous town of Eskdale was struck by a 7-meter flash flood, destroying, or damaging everything in the valley. Entire houses were swept away. 40,000 homes lost power after a substation near Napier was damaged due to another river far exceeding its banks. Four of the main roads out of the region were closed due to serious damages to the infrastructure. The damages have amounted to over $10 billion dollars, making this the most expensive storm in the Southern Hemisphere, ever.

With two record breaking storms spaced two weeks apart, how out of the ordinary was this summer? Here shows historic rainfall data for Auckland, from Metservice:

As you can see with the large blue bar to the right, our January has been more wet than Winter 2022. Winter 2022 was one of the wettest on record, according to NIWA. This is shown on this graph, on the far left:

This shows beyond doubt that the weather has been changing. Our climate is getting warmer, and wetter every year, in the short term. This could be attributed to localised weather treads over times of 300 years. For example, from the 1300s to the 1800s, Europe and North America experienced a cooling of the weather, that would be reverted by the start of the 1900s. Another explanation for our weather trends is the all too often mentioned “Climate Change” (various rather different terms are used to explain the same phenomenon, so I choose to keep “Climate Change” in quotation marks). This means we all need to be more prepared in case of flooding and cyclones. I recommend looking at the Civil Defence website for their disaster preparation recommendations. I hope we all stay dry in what could become the wettest year on record.

By Arthur Deutsch, Year 11