Wairoa health and housing woes

Cyclone Gabrielle and weather events continue to hit Wairoa District hard with the Mayor Craig Little saying the district has around 130 unliveable houses, as the council prioritises getting whānau back into their homes.

“We need funding of $6-9 million to achieve this and to ensure continuity of work, so we can attract tradespeople here to do what is needed,” Little said.

“The figure is based on assessments on what the cost would be to bring uninsured and underinsured flood-impacted homes back to a liveable standard. The estimated cost per house to achieve this is $139,000 across an estimated 66 homes.”

Little also mentioned the unsustainability of having a growing community of 9,000 plus people with no aged care facility, no Intellectually Handicapped Services, and no dentist.

Little told BayBuzz that while provision of these services was not a council role, the council would be actively advocating for a return of these “vital services”.

“Council, through its involvement with the Wairoa Community Partnership Group, is working with all government agencies to have Wairoa’s essential health needs met,” he said.

“Wairoa’s loss of services was raised with the previous government, and we have also reached out to the new Coalition Government and asked for a direct liaison to Te Whatu Ora to ensure the organisation works explicitly with Wairoa health services to ensure a national approach to recruitment and retention to enable services to be delivered locally.

“The lack of primary health care and mental health support is having a huge impact on our community.”

With all these balls in the air, and the district still picking up the pieces post-cyclone, the council has also launched an independent reiew into why Wairoa flooded so severely during Cyclone Gabrielle.

Little told BayBuzz the community could not move forward until a definitive answer to the catastrophic flooding was known.

“We still have around 140 yellow stickered homes and 627 properties in Land Category 2A. Our focus is on getting whānau back into their homes, but to achieve that, we need to know what caused such extreme flooding on February 14,” he said.

“Wairoa has secured $70m, ring-fenced by the Central Government for flood mitigation. WSP engineers contracted by HBRC are looking at flood protection options to take our impacted residents from 2A to Land Category 2C and 1. But we cannot plan and build solutions when we do not know with certainty what caused the flooding.”

Little wrote to the HB Regional Council directly after the cyclone, asking for answers to a series of questions.

“While some questions were addressed, we are not confident we know all the answers. The Regional Council told us they would be carrying out an independent investigation into why Wairoa flooded so severely in Cyclone Gabrielle. This has not happened, which has prompted our Council to start this vital work ourselves. This review is not a Wairoa District Council responsibility, but we are concerned about the wellbeing of our people, and we need to know why we flooded before we start river protection and for the future prosperity of our community.”

He said the council was aware of a series of contributing factors including debris and slash “backed up like beaver dams on bridges, a huge volume of water that came into the Wairoa catchment, the location and openness of the Wairoa bar and the tide, shallow waterways, management of Genesis and Waihi power schemes and overflows. It may be a combination of these things that was the cause or something that has not even been considered. The key, though, is knowing why we flooded so significantly so we can work on a solution.” 

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