Wairoa mayor Craig Little says the regional council should apologise to the town after flooding caused major damage. Photo / Paul Taylor
Wairoa mayor Craig Little says the regional council should apologise to the town after flooding caused major damage. Photo / Paul Taylor
Wairoa mayor Craig Little has called for an apology from Hawke’s Bay Regional Council after flooding swept through about 120 homes and caused tens of millions of dollars worth of damage to the town.
The regional council says it and the Government are reviewing how the flood happened and the operational decisions made, and it “would be premature comment until these reviews are complete”.
About 400 properties were affected and about 120 homes flooded in the lower part of the town in northern Hawke’s Bay last Wednesday when the Wairoa River overflowed.
Long-term residents said they had never experienced flooding to that extent in that part of town, and many believe the regional council should have started work earlier to open the bar at the Wairoa River mouth, which can take two days to open with machinery.
The regional council has defended its decision not to begin work opening the bar until the day before the floods.
The council said there would “likely be insufficient flow in the river to keep a new opening in place” if work had started earlier.
Local contractor Pryde Contracting was put on standby on the Friday before the floods to open the bar, but did not get the go-ahead until Monday afternoon. Pryde mobilised equipment to the site on Monday afternoon and began work on Tuesday.
HBRC chair Hinewai Ormsby told RNZ “I guess we can all agree that if the mouth could have been opened earlier, there would have been far less impact on those communities who are quite vulnerable”.
Pryde Contracting’s Hamish Pryde told RNZ, in his opinion, “when you are dealing with people’s houses and livelihoods with flooding there should be a greater margin of error and should be more erring on the side of safety”.
However, “it is not really for me to decide whether that was a fair call” around the timing, he said.
Wairoa mayor Craig Little has publicly called for HBRC to apologise to the community.
Crews cleaning up flood-hit Wairoa. Photo / Paul Taylor
Little claimed the bar at the river mouth should have been opened days before the event, and “the regional council listening to the wrong people has caused catastrophic and unnecessary damage to our township”.
“Our community has asked for and needs an apology, and I have made the request, yet we have not received an apology from the regional council despite it now being a week after the flooding,” he said.
“The Hawke’s Bay Regional Council is responsible for the river mouth management.”
“The Government has called an immediate inquiry into the Wairoa River mouth management, and still, we have no apology from the organisation responsible for looking after the bar,” Little said.
“The type of flooding that occurred in Wairoa has not happened in living memory and impacted around 400 local properties with 123 yellow placards issued.
He claimed “for years we have been asking the regional council to listen to our local knowledge when it comes to the river mouth, and now, what we had been trying to avoid has happened”.
An HBRC spokesman said the regional council was still gathering all the facts to determine what happened.
“[This] is the purpose of both the Government review and the independent review that HBRC has commissioned of how and why the flooding occurred and the operational decisions that were made.
“It would be premature comment until these reviews are complete.
“Working together as a region and as local government is the best way forward for recovery in Wairoa.”
