A child asleep on a couch floating in the water. Two thousand passengers trapped in a flooded airport. Hundreds of people evacuated from their homes.
The morning after the worst downpour since record-keeping began for Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, residents were grappling with the scale of the damage after flash flooding swept through Friday night.
Late Saturday morning, Chris Hipkins, New Zealand’s new prime minister, flew over the city in the cockpit of a military plane from Wellington, the capital, to assess the damage from the air. An earlier departure had been delayed by bad weather.