Dark days of flood remembered

People gather at Donald and Liz Polson's farm last month for Party in the Paddock to remember the 2004 floods. Photo/File

While this comment is not strictly anything to do with conservation, I thought it timely as a reminder to us all, just how fragile our land and life can be when such adverse events occur, as we saw in 2004.

On February 14, many of those who were affected by the 2004 flooding meet at the Polson farm to recognise the 10th anniversary of the event, gathering to remember the day and the consequences of such flooding to the lower North Island.

From memory Government spent something like $50 million by way of subsidised assistance to ensure agriculture production didn't come to a complete standstill.

Locally - the Waitotara Valley, Wanganui, Ruapehu and down to the Rangitikei River - the government injected around $8 million to get the damaged farm infrastructure back up and running.

Ten years on, I am not overly confident that some would be in a better position to manage another such event, as time seems to dim the memory.

From the rural point of view, once we lose our roads, power and communications you could be considered to be on your own.

Civil Defence has, in the past, taken a fair bit of criticism about how events of a rural nature are managed, given it has a small number of staff, predominantly urban-based and trained for the earthquake-type scenario, where access can be gained in most situations to most locations.

So when we have a rural situation where our roads, power and communications have all gone, who should we turn to?

Obviously Civil Defence and Emergency Management will have a role, but maybe we as rural residents need to take some responsibility for those around us as used to happen some years ago.

As a first, maybe we need to look after ourselves for the first three to five days until CDEM is in a position to start an organisational operation.

With access to modern communication systems, I'm sure the rural community will find a way of locally managing these events in future.

The biggest risk we face in these situations is a medical emergency happening in remote locations.

Now for a little conservation comment:

It's disappointing to read of the latest opinion poll run by Fish & Game, where questions were phrased to deliver a result that F&G desired.

I know they were involved in the Land and Water Forum, along with a great number of other interested parties, but in the end were a reluctant signatory to the final report.

To continue to hammer the dairy industry for not doing enough smacks of being sore losers as well as marginalising themselves to the point of isolating their own members.

As an industry, dairying needs to make some hard decisions in the future on how far they want to push their production increases. Some would say it's not far away from finding a level that sits between economic and environmental sense and economic and environmental stupidity. Something may be sorted sooner than we think.

Brian Doughty is Provincial President of Federated Farmers Wanganui and a long-time tramper