Hawke’s Bay council leaders are unfazed by the Government’s “repurposing” of $3 million from a Cyclone Gabrielle sediment and debris removal vote for a more immediate need in Wairoa.
The immediate help for the Northern Hawke’s Bay town was announced during a flying visit on Saturday by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Emergency Management and Recovery Minister Mark Mitchell, after Government had asked for councils to reprioritise spending of the 2024 Budget sediment and debris removal fund of $10m.
The request came in light of the flooding of the lower reaches of Wairoa on June 26 - 16 months after the widespread devastation across Hawke’s Bay in Cyclone Gabrielle in February last year.
Hawke’s Bay Regional Council chairwoman Hinewai Ormsby said: “The repurposing of the funds makes sense in this moment of greater need in Wairoa and we will work with Wairoa District Council to ensure all the necessary support for the work to proceed at pace.”
Similar sentiments came from Napier Deputy-Mayor Annette Brosnan, in her role as acting mayor, and from Hastings Mayor Sandra Hazlehurst, whose district was smashed in the Cyclone.
Luxon flew in a New Zealand Defence Force helicopter over Wairoa before meeting affected residents on the ground, 10 days after the town was again hit by flooding. About 118 homes were inundated and hundreds more flooded to a lesser extent after the devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle.
After returning to Napier, Luxon told media it’d been “good to get on the ground and actually see what’s happening”.
“As we were moving around there was still a lot of home debris and property that was being ripped out of houses... as they were dried out. Obviously, we saw some challenges with debris and sediment.”
A review is also planned amid allegations Hawke’s Bay Regional Council didn’t get contractors to open the bar at the nearby Wairoa River mouth early enough, but the council says it waited because of insufficient flow in the river to keep a new opening in place.
The review would be led by former Police Commissioner Mike Bush, Luxon said today.
Danielle Brown-McKenzie spoke to the Prime Minister from the Kopu Rd property she lives on with five other family members, including her grandparents in their 80s and her 4-year-old son Te Ariki McKenzie-Blake.
Her grandparents’ two-storey home had been yellow-stickered while two other flats on the 0.4-hectare property owned by the family for 60 years were liveable – albeit now colder for her bronchitis-prone son – but needed major flood repairs, she said.
“I showed him [Luxon] a photo of where the original bar was back in 1985 ... and why [our property] didn’t flood in all those other flooding events, and why it flooded now. [I told him] if we have the bar in a more stable place, Kopu Rd won’t flood.”
She had feared for her life as fast-flowing water rose “so fast” during the flood, reaching her thighs before an uncle came to the rescue in his ute.
“I’m not a very good swimmer and I thought, ‘How am I supposed to save my baby?’ I was scared the whole house was gonna be ripped away. I was so grateful [to be rescued], I was bawling my eyes out... even then the water was coming up over the [ute] lights and getting in through the doors.”
The three homes on the property had never previously been flooded, but were considered uninsurable because they were on a flood zone, Brown-McKenzie said.
She didn’t yet know what repairs would cost, but the family would try to get them done.
“Wairoa needs more funding to be able to help all the ones like us that are uninsured, and even the insured, a lot of them have asbestos in their homes and getting that cleaned out is expensive on its own, and then you still have to repair everything.”
Today’s $3m announcement was good news for the town, she said.
“We don’t want to be forgotten. We want people to see us and to hear us, hear what we’re going through.”
The Prime Minister also met with first responders and thanked them along with Wairoa District Mayor Craig Little, Civil Defence and council workers, volunteers, Māori wardens, iwi and contractors for the “exceptionally good job” they’d done supporting Wairoa “in a really difficult time”.
“It’s a community that’s shown tremendous resilience over the last year [as] it’s had to deal with significant weather events.”
The Government had already pledged $600,000 to the Wairoa mayoral relief fund to help support the town’s recovery, but today’s $3m boost would allow Wairoa District Council to get on with cleaning up household waste and sediment left by the flooding, Mitchell said.
A $10m fund was included in May’s Budget for Hawke’s Bay to complete its sediment and debris removal from Cyclone Gabrielle but after last week’s severe weather event, the Government asked the region to reprioritise part of this funding for the clean-up in Wairoa, said Mitchell, who was also in Wairoa this morning.
“The Wairoa District Council has identified what it needs, and this additional funding is immediately available for the work.
“This funding will go towards the clean up of household waste and sediment for more than 400 properties impacted by last week’s weather event. This includes the collection, removal, and disposal of sediment, debris and household waste.”
The reprioritisation was a great example of the whole region working together to support Wairoa, he said.
Before Luxon’s visit, the Government confirmed an urgent review of Wairoa’s flooding response and whether local councils could’ve acted earlier to prevent the disaster, which saw properties in the lower part of the township flooded on Wednesday last week.
There was “a need” for another look at the regional council’s actions around the bar, and its management, Luxon said before the review was announced.
“The river has broken in a place where it has historically not broken before.”
Long-term residents told media they’d never experienced flooding to that extent before in that part of town, and many believe it could’ve been prevented if Hawke’s Bay Regional Council had started work earlier to open the bar at the nearby Wairoa River mouth.
They waited until the day before the floods to begin work on the bar because there would likely be insufficient flow in the river to keep a new opening in place if they’d started earlier, the regional council’s asset manager group manager Chris Dolley said.
The review would assess whether there was adequate monitoring of the bar and whether decisions made were correct, Environment Minister Penny Simmonds said.
“It is about finding out where improvements can be made so we can better manage future events and protect communities,” she said.
The review would take about four weeks, with findings presented to the council in August.
Cherie Howie is an Auckland-based reporter who joined the Herald in 2011. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years and specialises in general news and features.
Additional reporting: Doug Laing, Hawke’s Bay.
The enterprise software company DataDog is investing almost US$1b a year into artificial intelligence.