Southland Mayor Rob Scott says much of the region remains without power following one of the strongest storms the district had experienced in recent years.

He said while some progress had been made restoring electricity, the situation remained severe across the large district.

“It’s still out. It’s slightly improved from a few hours ago, but on the whole, across our big district and region, it’s still not that pretty,” Scott told Newstalk ZB.

He said PowerNet crews were assessing damage from the air.

“To give you a bit of scale, the Southland district’s 30,000 square kilometres, so you can imagine the spread of power lines across that,” he told Newstalk ZB.

“The force of that storm that hit yesterday was actually bigger than Gabriel, so it gives you a bit of an idea of the size and the scale of what we had.”

Scott said repair crews were working as fast as possible but warned that many residents would face another night without electricity.

He told Newstalk ZB he had never experienced wind as strong as what hit the region.

“That wind yesterday was incredible. I’ve never felt anything like that,” he said.

The outage had also affected several water treatment plants, leaving some towns without a reliable water supply.

“Obviously our water treatment plants need power to operate,” he said. “We’ve got three towns at the moment that are struggling. One of them, we’re even struggling to get a generator to work because when the electricity went out, it blew out some of the circuitry in the plant. So we’re getting water tankers out to those towns to supply water.”

Scott said communication across the district remained difficult, with cell phone coverage limited.

“I live in the middle of Southland and driving this morning, I had no cell phone reception at all or power across any of the towns,” he said. “The comms piece is quite important, being able to get out to our communities and talk to people as well.”

Scott hoped essential services could be restored before more bad weather forecast for next week.