More than 360 Cyclone Gabrielle injury claims accepted so far, number likely to grow

Fractures, foreign bodies lodged in eyes and soft tissue injuries are among hundreds of claims made following Cyclone Gabrielle.

As of Tuesday, 365​ new accepted claims had been made to ACC related to injuries caused by the weather chaos of last week, in which 11​ people died.

That’s on top of nearly 1000​ injury claims made to ACC due to the Auckland floods.

Close to half of cyclone-related claims so far (48%​) had been made in the Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) region (175)​, followed by 67​ in Hawke’s Bay/Tasman districts, 46​ in Waikato, 40​ in Northland and 16​ in Gisborne.

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It comes as health officials in Auckland have been notified of several cases of waterborne disease leptospirosis, some of which may be related to the recent extreme weather events.

Leptospirosis is spread through contact with the urine of infected animals or contact with water sources contaminated by their urine.

Symptoms include fever, muscle pains and headache.

Auckland Regional Public Health Service said it was also aware of increased anecdotal reports of gastroenteritis in the community.

However, data for the Auckland region showed “typical volumes” of people seeing their GPs with gastro-type symptoms.

Soft tissue injuries (when trauma or overuse occurs to muscles, tendons or ligaments, such as strains and sprains) accounted for the highest proportion of injury claims made as of Tuesday.

These injury claims related to either the direct weather events or subsequent clean-up, ACC said.

Claims were identified as being related to Cyclone Gabrielle where the accident description included the keywords flood, storm, cyclone, Gabrielle, wind, windy or winds.

The accident date needed to be between February 12-20 and the location needed to be Auckland, Northland, Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Gisborne, Hawke’s Bay or the Tasman district.

A claim could be lodged immediately following an accident or at any later stage, so the numbers were expected to change, an ACC spokesperson said.

Auckland floods injuries

As of Tuesday, 970​ new accepted claims related to the earlier Anniversary weekend floods had been made to ACC between January 27 and February 9​.

Auckland accounted for the vast majority of those claims, with 917​ in total.

Twenty-nine​ were made in Waikato, 17​ in Bay of Plenty and seven​ in Northland.

Soft tissue injuries and laceration/puncture/stings were the most common diagnoses claimed for following the late January flooding event.

Close to 20​ fractures or dislocations had also been claimed for across Tāmaki Makaurau due to the floods, in which Auckland saw its wettest day on record.

For the purposes of the data, an end-date of February 9 had been included on the Auckland flood event to avoid picking up claims linked to preparing for Cyclone Gabrielle.

Those could not be differentiated without staff manually reviewing them, ACC said.