I’ve lived in New Zealand for over 15 years now and I have never experienced, 1) more than an hour of the power going off, 2) work cancelled because of a storm, 3) of a truly destructive storm in the scale of what I’ve experienced in the Philippines.

And I hope I never do, so here’s to jinxing it.

For the first time, government authorities have actually issued a pre-storm warning ahead of Cyclone Gabrielle making land-fall or a pass through.