KEY POINTS:
Washing of houses in Patea will start today but residents won't know until Monday how toxic the rubble left by an inferno at the town's derelict freezing works is.
About 300 residents were evacuated after the blaze broke out at the asbestos-laden industrial site across the river from the town shortly after midnight on Tuesday.
The all-clear to return home was given after 6pm Wednesday but residents are being advised to keep their windows shut as an assessment is made of the chemicals in the ruins.
Firefighters continued to damp down the site yesterday as calls were made for the Government to do what a string of private owners had not - clean up the site.
Craig Stevenson, chief executive of South Taranaki District Council, said anyone concerned about contamination could have their houses washed down by the Fire Service and a council rural fire tanker from this afternoon.
"We'll go door-to-door and anyone wanting a washdown can have one," he said.
The Taranaki Regional Council was looking at covering the site with a chemical used on dusty roads that bound particles together and stopped them blowing around.
A new fence would be erected to secure the site. There would also be a leaflet drop to residents with information.
Results of samples taken at the site will not be ready until Monday and a further assessment of what needed to be done would occur after the results were known.
Mr Stevenson said there were several private owners of the site, including a local farmer who grazed livestock and a company with directors in Australia who were hard to get hold of.
"Our priority is to deal with the issue. We'll figure out responsibility and cost-sharing later."
Norman MacKay, who worked at the meatworks for 29 years and was mayor of Patea when the plant shut in the 1980s, said the works had given the town a bad name and everyone wanted the wreck removed.
"I can't see anyone taking the task of removing all the rubble because of the cost. The local authority can't afford that sort of cost," he told Radio New Zealand.
Mr MacKay called on the Government to help "a small community like ours which has struggled for some years now".
Environment Minister Trevor Mallard said the issue of Government funding would be considered once the investigation of the site announced last year was finished. The Government was contributing $60,000 to the cost of that investigation.
National MP Chester Borrows, who was a policeman in Patea in the 1980s after the meatworks closed, said the Government needed to have a strategy to clean up such sites as there were many of them in small rural towns.
"My position is that the Government doesn't have strategy on dealing with these orphan sites".
The land value was less than the value of the clean-up of such sites.
He said Patea had only about 1000 ratepayers, a huge proportion of whom were on government support or were pensioners.
"If this was on a Tauranga waterfront it would have a value of $20 million and people would be falling over themselves to pay $5 million to clean it up so they can have the site."
Still, the coastal property boom has hit Patea. Someone who bought a section for $1 in Patea about five years ago was rumoured to have sold it 18 months ago for $65,000.
"When I was a cop there I could have bought a house for under $10,000," Mr Borrows said.
He said Patea had "pulled itself up and had its chin up".
People were working at meatworks in other towns or at Fonterra's site in Hawera. Local iwi also played a big role in the community.
The fire would bring the issue of the meatworks to a head.
- NZPA
