Horizons Regional Council’s Dr Rachel Keedwell: Summer means more progress on flood damage repairs

A digger strengthens the bank of the Manawatū River on Te Matai Rd after flood damage.

OPINION

The increasingly dry weather is good news for the Horizons river management team – summer means much more progress can be made in repairing flood damage and strengthening our flood protection systems.

Cyclone Gabrielle caused a large amount of flood damage to rivers and the surrounding land across the region, but most significantly in Tararua and to the Pohangina and Oroua Rivers. The scale of the damage and the wet winter has meant not all the work has been completed and the team still has a lot of work to do to fix the damage, as well as continuing with business as usual.

Originally, about $9 million worth of flood repair work was identified after Cyclone Gabrielle. Additional weather events added more jobs to the list, increasing the cost of repairs even further. Some of these were minor fixes, but others were major repairs that required significant engineering and design work to establish the best way to fix the issues.

Part of the design and planning work for the repairs included ensuring repairs were done in a way that added resilience to future flooding, rather than just replacing like-for-like and risking the work being washed away. To date, the team is about halfway through the work programme.

To enable all these storm repairs to go ahead, other projects around the region have had timeframes extended to free up staff to work on the more urgent repairs. These projects include some major works such as the river training structures at the mouth of the Whanganui River, known as Te Pūwaha, and climate resilience work programmes in Palmerston North and on the Rangitīkei and Lower Manawatū Rivers.

All these projects were partially funded by the central government agency Kānoa - Regional Economic Development and Investment Unit.

As I have discussed in previous columns, carrying out all the flood repair work after Gabrielle will exhaust many of the council’s reserve funds for river management. Areas of rivers that are in Horizons’ river management schemes are rated through targeted rates on the surrounding ratepayers, plus a contribution from across the region. These rates would usually enable a build-up of reserves over time to allow repairs after floods, but many weather events have been chipping away at the reserves, and Gabrielle has cleaned out many schemes for the remaining reserves.

This isn’t a total surprise, because we have been watching slowly declining reserve balances across several schemes, but the added impact of Gabrielle has brought it into sharp focus for councillors. Our upcoming Long Term Plan, which will be out for consultation in March, has a focus on how we will meet this challenge, and I welcome the discussions with the community about all the difficulties that are facing us.

Dr Rachel Keedwell is chairwoman of Horizons Regional Council.