Landslide prompts pohutukawa lover to think again

By ROSALEEN MacBRAYNE

Ardent conservationist Meg Collins is no longer an advocate of preserving pohutukawa trees at any cost.

She is seeing the catastrophe the mighty evergreens can cause when they become waterlogged - the evidence is on her own Eastern Bay of Plenty doorstep.

Mrs Collins and her husband Mike arrived home on Tuesday to find their bed and breakfast cabin poised atop a cliff, and their Ohiwa Harbour Rd house behind it also in a perilous position.

A giant mudslide on Saturday night took with it a pohutukawa and the bank on which it stood, pinning neighbour Colin Ratlidge, 74, and his elderly spaniel Chelsea under thick mud in the estuary for several hours.

"All our trees and bloody soil have gone across the road and into the harbour," an upset Mrs Collins said yesterday, amid talking to engineers, Earthquake Commission staff and insurers. "We're shattered."

In Wellington to celebrate her mother's 90th birthday at the weekend, the couple got a telephone call to say the bank had gone.

But they had "no concept" of the scale of the landslide until they stopped at Levin on Monday to get a newspaper. There, on the front page of the Herald, was the picture which has gone around the world - their home of three years and that of next door neighbours Jim and Pam Greenaway, both on the brink of disaster.

"It wasn't a good drive from there," said Mrs Collins.

A former Environment Bay of Plenty councillor, she has served on the Forest and Bird Protection Society and Project Crimson, the trust which has brought the pohutukawa back from serious decline.

"I think there should be another look at precarious pohutukawas that are hanging over people's properties and roads," she said. "We have got to be realistic."

There were tight restrictions on trimming or felling the trees, but the bulk needed to be removed from some because of the danger they posed in storms.

"We have all been too precious. They may be icons but we should make it easier for councils and property owners to prune them back when they are perched in populated areas."

Mr and Mrs Collins do not know yet if they will be able to stay in their home.

But that pales into insignificance when Meg Collins thinks of her good friend, Beverley Freeman, crushed to death under another landslide at nearby Bryan's Beach.

"Bob [Freeman] has lost his wife, his house, his campervan, his car ... That far overshadows any of our problems."

Mrs Freeman's funeral will be held in Whakatane on Saturday.