Most of Napier should see power return within hours, Mayor Kirsten Wise told Breakfast this morning.
She spoke on recovery efforts for the city, most prominently community wellbeing and bringing electricity back into homes.
"People are doing it tough, there's a big part of our city that still doesn't have power, which means they can't charge their phones, they're isolated, and people are starting to get really, really anxious," she said.
"First and foremost our focus the bulk of the city should be back connected by the end of today, say tomorrow at the latest."
Among many other things on Napier's recovery to-do list, Wise said returning power to the city is a top priority at the moment.
"Not having power for coming up a week now and not being able to do those basic things, that's what we need to focus on, get them back then we can start to look at those longer-term needs," she said
In terms of searching homes, she said FENZ has 20 more houses to investigate, all based in Esk Valley, which should be completed today.
Though it is possible that more casualties could come about from these searches, Wise discourages speculation on the cyclone's death toll.
"People are already feeling really fragile and vulnerable, so speculating about horrendous numbers of deaths is just not helpful for anybody," Wise said.
She said "big decisions" needed to be made about Napier's core infrastructure, saying it "astounds" her that the entire telecommunications and power networks could be cut off from the city of 67,000 without any backup sources.
"We're talking billions and billions of dollars [in recovery], I was fortunate to get the Prime Minister's ear... and believe me I let him know what we would be needing as a community to recover from this.
"We don't have a hospital, we don't have a police station, our civil defence is based in Hastings, so all of those essential services are in Hastings and we were not able to access any of them - a population of 67,000. So there's some big conversations that need to be had."
She hopes to hear announcements of extra resourcing today in order to combat looting in the region.
"Our people have been through enough and the last thing they need is to be bullied and intimidated and have their generator stolen."
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