$1m cost put on district's repairs

It will be weeks before Humber St is reopened, the Waitaki District Council says. Photo / Hamish Maclean

Cleaning up after flooding in the Waitaki district could cost up to $1million.

Waitaki District Council acting chief executive Neil Jorgensen said council crews continued to assess damage to the district yesterday.

"We're expecting that to be the top end,'' Mr Jorgensen said. "But until we've done a full assessment, we won't actually know [the cost of the cleanup].''

While several roads in the district reopened yesterday, 32 Waitaki roads remained closed; there was flood damage to the council building; five Oamaru properties were damaged in localised slips; the Duntroon, Otematata, Lower Waitaki and Hampden-Moeraki water supplies were all on boil-water notices; and a "very small number of properties'' experienced contamination directly with sewage after widespread flooding in the north end of Oamaru.

Council contractors had water-blasted and treated those properties identified with lime.

Though the Regina Lane wastewater pump station had been inundated on Friday and the "switchboard got fried'', which had exacerbated the problem, Waitaki Mayor Gary Kircher said the issue had also probably occurred where people had hooked stormwater into the sewers.

"I've asked staff to report back on the situation around where it's been into people's basements ... and what needs to happen there,'' he said.

"It's the same thing as if you tried to get 50,000 cars through Oamaru in an hour type thing. It's a flaw we know about, but you're never going to have a system which can deal with those extremes.

"Having said that, we will keep working on getting stormwater out of sewers so that the problem decreases. There should be no stormwater systems hooked into the sewers, but unfortunately there are.''

Restoring the roading network was another priority and would "cut into our existing roading budget'' but the council had ``several million dollars'' in a disaster fund.

"This is not a time to pinch pennies as such. We need to get things up and running so people can get on with their lives as normal as quickly as we can.''

Mr Jorgensen said early reports showed most of the damage to the roading network was superficial and while the closed Humber St bridge was likely to be the most expensive damage in the district, it would be closed for weeks as the council addressed higher priorities.

"It's not stopping anyone from accessing anywhere,'' he said. And the council was focused on opening closed areas to allow people access to the network.

Oamaru Volunteer Fire Brigade Chief Fire Officer Steve Couper said with just two callouts to deal with flooding yesterday, things were ``definitely slowing down''.

The brigade had responded to nearly 100 callouts since the rain started falling on Friday and he hoped for several days of fine weather.

Mr Jorgensen said a different system had been used to log calls for service at the weekend operations centre. On Friday the council received about 300 calls. It had received another 150 calls by noon yesterday.

hamish.maclean@odt.co.nz