Emergency teams are hopeful the worst of the weather is past for flooded Auckland, Emergency Management Minister Kieran McAnulty says.

“The most promising thing is that the forecast is less severe than it has been over the last couple of days,” he told Newstalk ZB this morning.

“We’re treading with caution, however, because the rain that Auckland experienced yesterday and last night was far more than forecast.”

Yesterday’s “extreme weather” event happened so fast it caught everyone by surprise, McAnulty said.

“We knew that rain was coming, but not to the extent that it did and not the speed that it did.

“We’ve all seen images of cars being abandoned with windscreen wipers still going.

“There’s no way that you can predict that sort of weather coming so quickly.”

When asked what Aucklanders waking to flooded and damaged properties should do today, McAnulty said the first port of call should be to their insurance company.

Emergency Management Minister Kieran McAnulty says the weather forecast is looking less severe today. Photo / Mark Mitchell

“My experience with insurance companies is they have been proactive in severe weather events and this one I expect will be no different,” he said.

He said that during the recent Nelson floods a community centre was set up and most of the insurance companies had teams there that people could call into and sit down and talk through their situation with.

“And I would hope something like that would happen in Auckland also,” he said.

He said he was aware that floodwaters had subsided at Auckland Airport where stranded passengers bunkered down in the terminal overnight due to nearby roads being flooded.

Those travellers have now left but the airport has advised no flights will be taking off before midday.

Asked again about whether Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown was slow to declare a state of emergency, McAnulty said there would be a review into the process once the emergency response had passed.

“There will be a review, I’ve committed to that,” he said.

“We need to take lessons from every response and it’s clear that there needs to be lessons from this one, we’ll leave that to the review.

“For now the Prime Minister and I are just focusing on the response.”

The decision to activate the Beehive Bunker allowed for more resources and facilities to be brought to bear by emergency teams to help with the response.

He said there would no doubt be a lot of disappointed fans among those who had already travelled to last night’s Elton John concert and were at the venue when it was cancelled.

“I know that there’s a lot of disappointed people because I understand it was his last ever tour,” McAnulty said.

“But I don’t think there’ll be a single person that didn’t understand why they had to make that decision.”

While he didn’t know the ins-and-outs of the last-minute decision to cancel the concert, he said the speed of the extreme weather had caught lots of people off-guard.