Rain puts an end to Ruataniwha dam site visit

Graeme Hansen, Hawke's Bay Regional Council, speaking to delegates at the Irrigation New Zealand conference. Photo/Duncan Brown

A major irrigation conference and expo in Napier has had an ironic start, with rain forcing the cancellation of a visit to the proposed Ruataniwha dam site because it was too wet.

The visit to the site, on the Makororo River near Wakarara in the eastern flanks of the Ruahine Ranges, had been scheduled in one of two tours available to conference-goers after registering for the conference yesterday morning.

The first tour started from the Marine Parade venue at 11am, and Irrigation New Zealand business manager Chris Coughlan said the decision to cancel the dam-site visit was made only about half an hour earlier. "Everyone's pretty disappointed," she said.

Ms Coughlan said the bi-ennial conference is being held in Hawke's Bay because of the dam project and about two-thirds of the 150 who booked tours chose the river systems excursion including the Ruataniwha scheme.

Much of the day was subsequently spent at Drumpeel, near Otane, where a presentation on the dam project was made in a grain shed.

The other tour available to conference-goers, who are expected to number about 400 by the time plenary sessions start today in Napier's War Memorial Conference Centre and the nearby MTG museum and art gallery complex, covered farming systems and associated industries on the Heretaunga Plains.

More than 40 speakers, including irrigation and dam project leaders from Australia, are lined up for the conference which will open with a powhiri at the entrance to the MTG starting at 8.30am.

The dam project, otherwise known as the Ruataniwha Water Storage Scheme, will be of particular focus of Irrigation Into Action session between 11am and 12.30pm today, featuring Hawke's Bay Regional Council chairman Fenton Wilson, council CEO Andrew Newman, who is currently seconded full-time as managing director of of the council's major projects management company (HBRIC), and Hawke's Bay "farmer and irrigator" Richard Dakins. Also speaking is former Hawke's Bay Regional Council strategic adviser Andrew Curtis, Irrigation New Zealand's chief executive officer since 2009.

This year's conference will focus on "realising irrigation's potential as a socio-economic development tool" current and future freshwater policy reforms, and "selling the irrigation dream," Mr Curtis says.

Among those who registered yesterday was Dame Margaret Bazley, chair of the Environment Canterbury commissioners.