One of the last roading repair jobs left after the July 2007 floods hammered Northland has been finished at last. Tauraroa Bridge was closed after the storm scoured out its supporting piles. The piles sank up to a metre, cracking the bridge deck and leaving it with a serious kink. About 70of Tauraroa Area School's 410-strong roll at the time used the bridge each day, leaving pupils to get off their bus on one side, trek across the bridge, and climb aboard another bus on the other side. When even walking across the bridge was deemed too dangerous, school buses - and all other traffic - had to take a 20-minute detour on metal roads. In September 2007 a temporary, wooden bridge was opened nearby for light traffic on private land owned by the Brownlee family. To save money, the old single-lane bridge deck was re-used and mounted on new piles. The $450,000 job, originally scheduled to finish before Christmas, was done by GHK Piling. Tauraroa Area School principal Grant Burns was delighted not just with the new bridge, but also the way it had been landscaped, cleaned up and made safer. "We're very grateful for the thorough job ... A big thumbs-up from the people of Tauraroa," he said. In another major Whangarei District Council bridge project, the Cove Rd bridge near Waipu is open. The new bridge is a straighter, two-lane structure with a concrete, hot-mixed deck on steel piles driven up to 12m into the river bed. The old bridge was suffering the effects of increasing traffic and salt water was corroding steel inside the structure.
