The clean-up of Wairoa after last week’s floods has received a $3 million boost as Prime Minister Christopher Luxon visited the devastated township this morning.
Luxon flew over Wairoa before meeting affected residents on the ground, 10 days after the northern Hawke’s Bay town was again hit by flooding. About 118 homes were inundated and hundreds more flooded to a lesser extent just 16 months after the devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle.
After returning to Napier he told media it had been “good to get on the ground and actually see what’s happening”.
“As we were moving around there was still a lot of home debris and property that was being ripped out of houses ... as they were dried out. Obviously, we saw some challenges with debris and sediment.”
A review is also planned amid allegations Hawke’s Bay Regional Council didn’t get contractors to open the bar at the nearby Wairoa River mouth early enough. The review would be led by former police commissioner Mike Bush, Luxon said today.
The Prime Minister also thanked Wairoa District mayor Craig Little, first responders, Civil Defence, council workers, volunteers, Māori wardens, iwi and contractors for the “exceptionally good job” they’d done supporting Wairoa “in a really difficult time”.
“It’s a community that’s shown tremendous resilience over the last year [as] it’s had to deal with significant weather events.”
The Government had already pledged $600,000 to the Wairoa mayoral relief fund to help support the town’s recovery, but today’s $3m boost would allow Wairoa District Council to get on with cleaning up household waste and sediment left by the flooding, Emergency Management and Recovery Minister Mark Mitchell said.
A $10m fund was included in May’s Budget for Hawke’s Bay to complete its sediment and debris removal from Cyclone Gabrielle but after last week’s severe weather event, the Government asked the region to reprioritise part of this funding for the clean-up in Wairoa, Mitchell said.
“The Wairoa District Council has identified what it needs, and this additional funding is immediately available for the work.
“This funding will go towards the clean up of household waste and sediment for more than 400 properties impacted by last week’s weather event. This includes the collection, removal, and disposal of sediment, debris and household waste.”
The reprioritisation was a great example of the whole region working together to support Wairoa, he said.
Before Luxon’s visit this morning, the Government confirmed an urgent review of Wairoa’s flooding response and whether local councils could’ve acted earlier to prevent the disaster, which saw properties in the lower part of the township flooded on Wednesday last week.
There was “a need” for another look at the regional council’s actions around the bar, and its management, Luxon said before the review was announced.
“The river has broken in a place where it has historically not broken before.”
Using machinery, it takes about two days to open the bar, a raised area of sediment that builds up in the mouth of the Wairoa River and which also caused significant issues during Cyclone Gabrielle.
The council put contractors on standby on Friday, June 21, but they didn’t begin work until the following Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, conditions were deemed unsafe
The regional council had listened to “the wrong people” and that had caused “catastrophic and unnecessary damage”, Wairoa Mayor Craig Little said as he called on the council to apologise to the community.
They waited until the day before the floods to begin work on the bar because there would likely be insufficient flow in the river to keep a new opening in place if they’d started earlier, the regional council’s asset manager group manager Chris Dolley said.
The review would assess whether there was adequate monitoring of the bar and whether decisions made were correct, Environment Minister Penny Simmonds said.
“It is about finding out where improvements can be made so we can better manage future events and protect communities,” she said.
The review would take about four weeks, with findings presented to the council in August.
Cherie Howie is an Auckland-based reporter who joined the Herald in 2011. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years and specialises in general news and features.