Federated Farmers’ Gisborne/Wairoa president Charlie Reynolds said it was no longer acceptable for the region not to have access through the gorge.
“The East Coast needs a plan B,” he said.
“Long-term, NZTA really need to have a really, really serious look at their road managements and rebuilding programmes, because we can’t handle this every 18 months, 36 months.”
He said the area needed a resilient road network.
“NZTA and the Government really need to consider a seriously decent plan B if the [Waioweka] Gorge gets wiped out through slips or something, because we can’t have animals sitting on trucks for 10, 12, 16 hours going south to then go north.”
Chief executive of industry group Transporting New Zealand, Dom Kalasih, supported the call to improve resilience of the country’s roads.
“One of the impacts is these increased costs,” he said. “The detour, say Whakatāne through to Gisborne, it’s an additional just over 200km. Time and money, that is a significant increase.”
NZTA’s controller for the SH2 Waioweka Gorge response and recovery, Rob Service, said in a statement the recovery was expected to take weeks, not days, as damaged areas were still being accessed and evaluated.
“We know how important this connection is for people and freight, and our immediate focus is on restoring at least one lane of access,” Service said.
“Crews are progressing as quickly as conditions safely allow, but the scale and instability of the slips make this a highly complex operation.”
He said crews were busy removing debris and clearing blocked culverts, but at least 1000 more truckloads of debris were needing to be removed from the area.
“While excellent progress is being made, the scale and complexity of the slips and uncertainty about the condition of the road underneath the debris means we expect the road to remain closed for some time yet.”
Service said it was too early to confirm a reopening timeline, and that animal welfare concerns should be directed to the Ministry for Primary Industries or Civil Defence.
NZTA will provide another update later this week.
Meanwhile, one of the country’s largest vegetable growers, Leaderbrand, said it had managed to get its produce out of the area via the road south.
It said while there had been a lot of rain, its produce was looking good and it was not expecting any shortages of broccoli or salad greens.
-RNZ
