Napier City Council is holding its first post-cyclone event with the free to the community Friday Fiesta which sees food trucks and bands in Memorial Square. Photo: Supplied by Napier City Council
Napier City Council is preparing to hold its first event post-cyclone this evening.
Friday Fiesta was launched four years ago and sees food trucks and bands park up in Memorial Square for a series of evenings over summer.
Council events manager Kevin Murphy said the weather this year had cancelled a few of the scheduled fiestas.
Staff thought now the region had moved out of a state of emergency, the time was right for one more.
"A lot of people have had such a hard time, but there's a lot of people that are now wanting to sort of try and get into that recovery phase. We want the city to actually feel that we're moving forward," he said.
"Events do play a role in being able to have that recovery phase, to get people feeling like they've got a little bit more life in them, [also] a little bit of normality."
The council says the free community event generally attracts around 400 people. Photo: Supplied by Napier City Council
The Friday Fiesta was a community affair, free and open to all ages, Murphy said.
It normally attracted around 400 people.
He also hoped it would help show the rest of the country the city was opening back up for business and events.
While there was widespread devastation across the region, central Napier and Hastings had largely been spared from the worst, Murphy said.
"The Broncos are playing the Warriors here at the end of May, May 27, and the Broncos' commercial manager was sitting over there in Brisbane. When he was looking at all the media, he thought the whole region was destroyed.
"I had to explain to him that McLean Park is actually fine... and there are areas that are OK."
A number of events in Hawke's Bay had been cancelled or postponed, but there were still a handful going ahead over the next few months, including a Rod Stewart Concert on 8 April.