Brian Rudman: There's a hole in the bottom of the sea, and we're going to fill it

On Wednesday evening, TV news played dramatic amateur video footage of a daredevil teenager throwing himself from the top of The Nun, a rocky promontory off South Piha Beach.

As he leaped, the rock seemed alive with his mates scrambling up to follow suit.

The next shot was of him flat in his hospital bed saying the doctors had told him he was lucky he wasn't permanently paralysed from the chest down. He'd landed badly and was left floundering in the water with two crushed vertebrae. The good news was he will make a full recovery.

In these safety-conscious times, I couldn't help wondering if the poor old Nun will be so lucky, especially with a spokesman from the local surf club saying it was a seasonal thing, carloads of young human lemmings turning up to partake in this odd Westie rite of passage.

I wonder if the safety police from the Waitakere City Council also saw the news item and have begun loading up the gelignite, ready to blast this naughty dangerous rock into oblivion?

Probably not, because, I suspect they're a bit busy at the moment, supervising the pouring of 1600 truckloads of concrete into a killer swimming hole in Huruhuru Creek, in Woodside Reserve on the Massey foreshore.

The concreting is part of a $745,000 exercise to remove the hole and replace it with a series of naturalistic, but totally phoney, rapids.

The popular swimming hole has been out of favour in recent times. In 2001, a local 4-year-old disappeared from home on his trike and his body was later recovered from the pool.

Five years before, a 3-year-old wandered too close to the edge of the creek and fell in, his aunt just failing to catch his fingers as he was washed by. His body was later found in the pool.

A child also drowned there in the early 1990s, triggering Waitakere City to build fences, remove an underwater shelf and put up warning signs.

After the 2001 death, a taskforce was established to investigate ways of reducing the risk for kids. A water safety information pack was distributed to local schools and, because fencing was seen as impractical or unworkable, it was decided that the best option was to get children involved in designing safety signage by running a contest.

Two years on, in April 2003, there seemed to have been a change of heart with the allocation of $10,000 "for the erection of appropriate safety fencing at the waterhole ..."

Four months on, the same city development committee voted $90,000 to fill in the waterhole and redesign the access to this section of the creek.

Somehow that $90,000 has suddenly exploded into $745,000, and despite the September 2003 resolution to advise the community, all this has happened without neighbours being aware.

Well, old acquaintance and swimming hole neighbour Ian Miller says he wasn't. He stumbled upon the plan several weeks ago and is ropeable this little corner of original Auckland is being made "safe" without local input.

He says it's a tidal hole that can fill to 8m deep, and they're playing King Canute trying to defeat it.

Councillor Linda Cooper says filling in the hole is "the very last thing we wanted to do ... However, it is a black spot and both morally and legally we have to do something effective to prevent any more deaths".

She does admit that "the real danger, however, is the number of children, often very young children, who swim there unsupervised or supervised inadequately".

"We simply can't stop the children getting into the pool and we can't make people supervise the children. Therefore, we cannot say with any confidence that more children won't drown."

She says they're filling the hole in because legally "we have a duty to protect people from known dangers". Also, as a human being, she doesn't want another child drowned knowing "we could have prevented it".

Councillor Cooper says kids will be safe playing in the artificial rapids.

From time to time, I'm glad I'm on the sidelines not having to make the hard decisions. But you have to wonder whether spending $745,000 on filling in a hole on the tidal foreshore might be a little excessive. Especially when there's plenty of stream and creek and seabed above and below the site to get into trouble in anyway.