By RNZ
A Wairoa business owner is taking the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council to court following last month’s flooding in the town.
And her lawyer wants others who lost possessions and incomes to join her.
Locals believe the council should have dug a channel through the Wairoa River sandbar that could have eased flooding sooner than it did.
Hundreds of homes were damaged during the flooding, causing roughly $40 million worth of damage.
Dianne Downey from The Limery wants the council to be held accountable for what she has lost. Machinery, vehicles, the processing plant and packhouse were all submerged.
“The value of the business has been taken away. The value of the land and buildings has been taken away. We had everything prepared for sale - now I’m stuck here,” she told RNZ.
Just two months earlier Downey had lost her business partner and husband, after 15 years spent building up the lime juicing operation.
“I’m happily sort of going along in my world, trying to grieve for the loss of my partner, then everything else has been taken away from me too. So what have I got to lose? I’ve lost everything.”
Two reviews into the regional council’s handling of the sandbar are set to be released later this month.
A statement of claim filed on Tuesday by Downey said 500 properties were flooded in Wairoa because the council failed to take timely action to open the river mouth.
The claim said the flooding damaged property plants, machinery, homes and belongings; reduced the value of land and businesses; inflicted stress, inconvenience, pain and suffering; and caused loss of income and increased expenses for repairs and temporary accommodation.
Lawyer Grant Shand said the crux of the claim was that the council took too long to take action.
“There’s a long history of it being done properly and in a timely fashion when the people of Wairoa have essentially been responsible for the decisions. But Hawke’s Bay Regional Council in Napier appears to have got this wrong, and it was done far too late.
“You have a long history of it being done successfully and in a timely fashion, but here it wasn’t. The people were ready to do it on Friday, but didn’t get told to do it until later - so that’s what’s caused the problem.
“But separately, here for the last 20, 25 years, you’ve had a knowledge that there needs to be stopbanks, spillways, the river needs to be dredged and also that the bar needs to be cut in a timely fashion.
“So it’s really a combination of all of those over the many years and this is what’s happened to hundreds of people in Wairoa in the past couple of weeks.”
The usual contractor was contacted on the Monday, Shand said, but was unavailable until the following day.
“He’s got a history of doing it. People know how long it takes to occur. The council was just late with the instruction here, and that appears to be the consensus of the community.
“And a couple of weeks ago, you had the head of the regional council essentially admitting that as well - that if it had been done earlier, you wouldn’t have the damage.”
Council chairperson Hinewai Ormsby told Nine to Noon in late June decisions about opening the Wairoa bar were made on the best information available at the time.
“The difficulty and the challenge, which has been longstanding, for the management of the Wairoa mouth opening has been the level in which the riverbed is at versus the swell and tide, and the timings and complexities around getting that right for the sake of human safety ... as well as it being successful to actually open it.
“To move one bucket of shingle and have it fill up with two just minutes later will not be a successful opening. But acknowledging that, we do all agree that had it been opened sooner we wouldn’t have seen the devastation that we have in Wairoa.”
Shand said he would ask the court to make it a class-action suit, so others that have “lost possessions, money, et cetera” can be compensated.
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