The state of emergency was declared at 6.33am on Friday, initially for seven days, following a month’s rain falling in 24 hours.
It caused landslips, which threatened homes, and forestry slash to wash down Brecon St from Bob’s Peak, inundating Queenstown Cemetery.
A total of 109 people were evacuated from homes around Brecon St and Reavers Lane.
On Friday night, 10 properties were red-stickered and two were yellow-stickered.
By late Saturday afternoon, however, just one yellow sticker remained after council contractors redirected the water flow away from the buildings and all occupants had been allowed to return.
Mr Lewers said yesterday the declaration, signed following formal advice from Emergency Management Otago group controller Matt Alley, was necessary to ensure police had powers to keep people away from their homes.
"When you’ve got 100 people displaced ... you can’t do that outside of an emergency.
"All of this was happening in the early hours of the morning.
"You couldn’t see the full extent of it and we had to enable police to exercise powers to keep people out of homes.
"It also gave extra legal protection to the contractors and emergency response team.
"There are reasons for it and even though it was short, it enabled us to clean up a lot quicker.
"If we’d done this just [normally] it would have taken probably three days longer to do."
Queenstown had now moved into a 28-day transition period, which meant some powers remained, including the ability to cordon off areas and restrict movement of people, but control was handed back to the council from the emergency management team about 3pm yesterday.
"That’s what we’re working on now."
Meanwhile, he was aware of international media beating up the situation, including The Guardian in the United Kingdom and the Sydney Morning Herald.
According to a photo on the former’s website, Queenstown was under water. The photo was of flooding in Gore.
Destination Queenstown sent information to agencies across New Zealand and Australia on Saturday morning, informing them the resort was open and accessible and expected that same information would be sent to Europe and the UK, Mr Lewers said.
"I can understand the concern [about reputational damage], but we dealt with the task at hand and now we’re pretty much back to normality — once we get the water sorted."
