“The ones behind them are still standing there waiting for the next flood,” he said.
“It keeps me awake at night ... the fact that we have yet to address this issue.”
Alder said he thought it was “premature” to shift the residual risk rating in the council report from serious to moderate until the problem was addressed.
The council report provided a quarterly update on the council’s strategic and enterprise risk management activities.
Alder said it was “scary” looking at the river area on Google Maps, and he wanted staff to provide drone footage or photos of the area, and for consents for the removal of the trees to be sped up.
“If I can have those two things, I might be able to sleep”
Deputy Mayor Aubrey Ria said in terms of the risk ratings, it could be helpful for graphs to show activities individually.
“I understand why we would be at ‘moderate’ because roading and flooding resilience has improved and there’s been a lot of infrastructure work done in those areas.”
Council community lifelines director Tim Barry said the council had put the resilience of the Te Arai water supply “at the highest possible level”.
However, it was “an outlier” across general infrastructure.
The council was advancing consents for forestry companies to remove trees in sensitive areas, which the council knew would pose a risk to the water supply pipeline.
It was looking to “surgically move into that area in the new year”.
“Some of the challenges here are typographical in nature – extremely steep slopes right by water bodies.”
There were a number of bridges, and what the council learnt through Cyclone Gabrielle was that “bridges and trees don’t work very well together in events”, he said.
The council had identified “high-risk trees”, some of which were “very large masses of timber” that sat above the council’s assets.
“We’ve got very delicate and challenging consents to try to remove some of those physically, so we are trying to do that this year (2025-26).”
Even if the council did its “best” to remove the trees in that time period, the risk would be ongoing because there were difficult areas to access, Barry said.
He acknowledged it was the council’s “biggest utility known risk”. The chances of an event happening were high over a long timeframe. However, in any one year, the chances were not high, he said.
The council had “an amount of spare pipe, sitting at Waingake, available to pull into action”.
“What we learnt from Gabrielle is that in six weeks we had the pipeline patched together again.”
The council did not have the money for a duplication pipe, so it worked on shortening the time to respond to an event by using the Waipaoa Water Treatment Plant, which took water out of the Waipaoa, to run the city “in limp mode” for that period of time.
Council chief financial officer Pauline Foreman said the council had mitigations in place and was working towards reducing the overall risks.
Chief executive Nedine Thatcher Swann said she was unsure whether the magnitude of the issue was significant enough to “impact on a whole system-wide approach to risk management appetite”.
The consents were for three private companies, she said.
Councillors could be taken to have a look at the area and have a briefing if they were interested, Thatcher Swann said.
The independent chairman of the meeting, Bruce Robertson, said asking staff to produce drone footage “in a small way” was asking them to divert resources.
He asked Barry to update the committee on the situation at the next quarterly meeting, following the work the council planned to do in the new year.
According to the council report, the Infrastructure Asset Management strategic risk is defined as “failure to provide sustainable, fit-for-purpose critical infrastructure services”.
The residual risk had been reassessed from serious to moderate following an October “deep dive” and the most recent Residual Risk Assessment.
This reflected steady improvement in the council’s overall asset management environment “with clearer governance and accountability now established across the three key infrastructure workstreams - water, roading and flood resilience”, the report said.
