More wild weather predicted to rip through Auckland tonight: 'This is a fast system'

With tens-of-thousand Aucklanders still without power following Tuesday's storm, the city will tonight gear up for more wild weather.

MetService has issued a severe thunderstorm watch for Thursday evening until midnight for Northland, Auckland and Waikato.

It says a fast-moving front over the north of the North Island is expected to bring thunderstorms.

The thunderstorms may briefly become severe with squally gusts of 110 to 120 km/h about western areas of Waikato and Auckland, and for much of Northland.

Although the sky cleared today to allow the clean up of fallen trees, and for Vector to undertake power line repairs, 25,000 homes and businesses are still without electricity in Auckland.

Around 180,000 properties had their supply cut at the height of the storm.

The city has been left with hundreds of trees blocking roads, crashing into carports and falling onto houses.

Vector said staff were progressing steadily through the list of more than 600 faults, power outages and reports of damage.

"Our outage field staff are committed to restoring power for customers as fast as they can, and will continue to work through weather conditions up until the point it is unsafe to do so," the company said.

Among the affected are 120 people in Powley Village, heading into their third freezing night, with only gas for hot drinks.

West Auckland's Piha community is also entirely without power.

"Feezer's been off for two days, got the rubbish bags to go back and clean it out. The power they promised yesterday, they promised today," local Piha resident Andrew Joseph says.

"Havent had a shower for three days or a shave ha."

Piha's campground has had to shut and its general store is running on generators, which is inundated with people getting supplies.

Many in west Auckland are fed up with Vector's ever changing deadlines, and frustrated with the power company's outages app.

"We apologies for that It was a huge volume of hits that went onto the application and it couldn't cope so it's something we're trying to address," Vector network delivery head Minoru Frederiksens says. 

"What we'd say to those people if they could go and look on our website."

Auckland MetService meteorologist Georgina Griffiths say the upcoming bout of weather is expected to be different to what happened on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

She says people in eastern or central parts of Auckland are unlikely to experience gusts as strong as the previous ones, which reached over 200km/h.

"We will see some wind damage tonight, particularly places that are quite vulnerable, if you've got half a tree hanging outside your house it's not ideal but this is a fast system," Griffiths says.

Emergency services are also getting prepared.

"We've got the generator here. That's recharging everything on station - our radios, our batteries," Phia chief fire officer Helen Edmonds says.

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