A garage collapsed in Lower Hutt during a tornado on Tuesday, injuring an elderly woman who was beside the building.
The woman in her 80s was hanging up washing along her fence beside the garage when the storm hit and building toppled.
Her family said the fence and the wall of the garage collapsed on her and had to crawl her way out.
"She described being in a really tight space amongst everything," her son in law said. "She doesn't know how she managed to extricate herself from that."
After managing to get out and make her way back inside, a nearby resident then came to check on her.
Luckily, the woman had escaped with just minor injuries. She was taken to the hospital but has since been discharged.
"She got a knock to the head and some lacerations on her leg," the son in law told Newshub.
Video footage from the scene showed the garage completely destroyed.
Fire and Emergency New Zealand Lower Hutt assistant commander Gareth Hughes told Newshub they received 64 callouts in Hutt City alone during Tuesday's storm.
"[We were] just dealing with lots of debris flying around the streets; there were chunks of tree, guttering from roofing [and] glass everywhere," he said.
Authorities had managed to respond to reports of damage from Tuesday's storm in a timely manner, Lower Hutt Mayor Campbell Barry said on Wednesday.
"Now, our response today is to just make sure those buildings that have been impacted are safe and to understand what work we need to be doing to get people back in them, so that's the priority."
The severe thunderstorm and small tornado on Tuesday also destroyed the front of Lower Hutt's New World supermarket, lifted roofs and toppled trees.
Two-thousand homes were without power and the Wellington Free Ambulance confirmed two patients had to be taken to hospital.
Both Barry and Hughes said they'd never seen anything like it.
