The co-authors of this column are current HBRC Heretaunga/Hastings Councillors Sophie Siers, Jock Mackintosh, Xan Harding and the Māui ki te Tonga Councillor, Thompson Hokianga. We are happy to be contacted to further discuss any points raised or to join any group meetings to share more about work that is being planned and undertaken by HBRC. Our contact details are available below and on the HBRC website.
The long-awaited Hawke’s Bay Independent Flood Review (HBIFR) was finally released this week. Led by the hugely experienced Dr Phil Mitchell, the three-member panel was tasked with reviewing the performance of HBRC’s flood systems and assets. The review sits alongside parallel reviews of HB Civil Defence Emergency Management (HBCDEM) and a national civil defence cyclone response review.
Together with our fellow Councillors and Council staff across Hawke’s Bay, we welcome the release of the HBIFR. Its recommendations are numerous and will take time to work through, but we are fully committed to doing so. As with any review, it has thrown up many things that could be done better. But its overwhelming message is that we all have to think differently about flooding.
The review starts by noting that Cyclone Gabrielle is the largest recorded flood event in New Zealand’s history. It states, “unsurprisingly, flood systems were overwhelmed”. What we must now accept is that any systems we design won’t ever be able to make us 100% safe or be able to promise that we never flood again. The report highlights the urgent need for a mitigation plan to manage events that overwhelm our defences, especially as the evidence mounts for those events becoming more frequent.
On the ground this means that HBRC must now be active in managing when and where rivers will flood, not just in trying to stop them doing so. We need our future flood systems to incorporate design for failure in a safe and controlled manner, not randomly as happened in the cyclone.
This is going to be extremely challenging for our community, as it is now apparent that what has served us in the past is not serving us now and nor will it into the future. Science is now telling us we must make more room for rivers as we can no longer expect them to lie quietly in their beds. This may require the creation of spillways and alternative flow paths, sacrificial ponding areas to dampen (excuse the pun) the destructive force of raging torrents. In many cases it may require us to make a managed retreat from areas that have up to now played a large part in the productivity and therefore the economy of our region. It certainly requires change and change requires engagement.
These are not decisions just for a bunch of Councillors sitting around a table. These are the choices that a community makes when it has recognised, assessed and worked to provide solutions for a problem. Good communication becomes paramount. The people who live and work here, have grown families, gardens, trees and livelihoods and have made a place to call home must be part of the discussion into the sustainability and future design of our environment.
Once our goals are clear, our job as Councillors is to try to ensure that the region can pay for, implement and maintain what we have all agreed to as a way forward.
Past councils have been criticised for not listening. Criticism comes with the territory and is either valid or not. Be assured that we listen, but it’s hard to be moved by criticism that is ill-informed or offers no smart alternative. Contradictory soap-box rants don’t help anybody with the challenges we face.
We know it’s cliched, but Councillors are ratepayers too and there are Councillors whose lives and livelihoods have been upended by flooding events. Our region requires a smart, strong plan with an equally strong team to lead it. We are confident it has both.
I appreciate that part of politics is “softening people up for change” when hard decisions force one’s hand, but how long until there is real action? The idea of managed retreat is hardly new; on the part of the Te Awanga coast it’s been mulled over for near two decades now, with no plan let alone movement in place. Now we see the Esk Valley being “repatriated” at enormous cost ($100m? $200m? more?) to remove the millions of tonnes of silt flooding deposited there… for what? A few years re-growth before it floods again? And unless I’m very much mistaken, that whole area was supposedly “red stickered”…. so why ANY clean up (other than for infrastructural necessity) in the first place?
Don’t get me wrong; I have enormous sympathy for those affected. But it’s patently clear a bullet must be bitten; pay them out generously, let them relocate and move on, instead of wasting hundreds of millions of tax and ratepayer dollars on a stop-gap cleanup that only sets the valley up to be devastated again.
The talking should already have been done. The decisions should already be being made. Taking another decade (and I’m being generous, given council process timelines) to bat it about a few more times does no-one service. Climate change is real, and it demands we redesign our systems to act with alacrity. Please do so.