Cleaning up flood damage in Tasman and Marlborough
More help to deal with the damage caused by flooding in Tasman and Marlborough is about to arrive in the form of the so-called "Enhanced Task Force Green."
The government has activated funds which means those on benefits in the area can volunteer to assist and become part of the group working to reverse some of the damage.
The Ministry for Social Development's Regional Commissioner for the area, Craig Churchill, says Enhanced Taskforce Green is entirely voluntary, but it will help those hit by flood damage and build skills for those taking part.
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RNZ News
a day ago
- RNZ News
Supplies flown in after 'huge' slip cuts off Motueka Valley homes
Cornelia Vervoorn next to one of the large slips. Photo: Supplied / Cornelia Vervoorn A handful of homes in the Motueka Valley are awaiting a second drop of supplies by helicopter, after their road access was cut off in the second of two devastating floods to hit the Tasman district. The Nelson Tasman region transitioned into an official recovery period last week , ending the state of emergency that was declared on 10 July, between two floods weeks apart that caused widespread damage to to homes, farms, orchards and businesses. Cornelia Vervoorn is one of those whose home has been cut off, after several slips came down on Hinetai Road, near Tapawera. Vervoorn, her partner and their neighbour have now been without road access for almost two weeks and it's likely to be a few more before it is reinstated. "The second bout of weather was even more intense than the first, we watched the river get higher and higher and we knew there was likely to be some rockfall on the road leading to our place but when we actually investigated it, it turned out there were six slips, one of which was really huge and totally impassable. "Luckily we live on a on a hill with really good drainage so our house was absolutely fine, so we're really lucky in that regard but we ended up without power for a week and there's no road access to our house." She had ordered groceries online that would be dropped off by helicopter on Thursday and she said she was most looking forward to fresh fruit and vegetables and a bottle of wine she had added as a treat. A crew flown in by helicopter to repair fallen power lines were able to bring in some feed for her horses, with Civil Defence also doing a drop of food items and a generator, after the couple returned the one they had borrowed after the first flood. "That made a difference, we could charge up phones and we had the wood burner, which was fantastic and I figured out how to make bread in a cast iron it was all very little house on the prairie." A helicopter bringing in supplies. Photo: Supplied / Cornelia Vervoorn The couple have lost road access before, including during ex-Tropical Cyclone Gita in 2018, and had pre-emptively parked a car at their neighbours around two kilometres down the road. They had been able to walk out across the slips to their vehicle but had avoided doing so while the slip was still active. She hoped that rain forecast for next week wouldn't cause any additional problems. "We're just concerned that it'll make the slips even less stable or affect our ability to cross them if we really need to get out." Tapawera Connect community connector Della Webby said there were still many people in the small community need of support. "It's been a real team effort, we've had tractors get to some people, we've had people walking over slips trying to get to others, we've had helicopters dropping supplies. It's been really good, but it's hard to sustain that amount of effort when there's so much work needing to be done still." Many people had their properties cleaned up after the first flood, only to have the second one two weeks later cause even more damage. While there had been lots of help offered, there was still more needed. "You might have five teams coming to help, but there might be 30 farms that are desperately needing it." She said free accommodation was available close to the town for those outside the district who were able to volunteer their time to reinstate fences and clear silt and debris. "So if there's people coming from outside of our district, we can actually house them and feed them too if they need it. A Hinetai Road slip that has cut off road access in Motueka Valley. Photo: Supplied / Cornelia Vervoorn The toll of recent events was clear when the Tasman District Council's flood relief navigators visited Tapawera last week to provide residents with support. "There was just a lot of emotion, a lot of tears. People are just starting to struggle emotionally with the second impact the second flood...I'm noticing there's a lot of anxiety around next week and a potential third event coming. "One small shower and people start panicking and going, 'is there going to be more? What am I going to do? Do I need to move? Is there going to be a slip? Are we going to have more trees down?' Just that heightened sense of anxiety." Tasman District Council group recovery manager Richard Kirby said a handful of homes remained cut off in the Graham Valley Road in the Motueka Valley and Hinetai Road, near Tapawera. Supplies had been dropped to those residents by helicopter last week, with another delivery planned for Thursday. "We are looking at alternative access for next week and particularly how we get groceries and food items to them if they can't get out and we're working on other plans rather than having to rely on choppers." Photo: RNZ / Mark Papalii Kirby said residents had been told not to walk across the large slip blocking Hinetai Road as there were concerns it was unstable, and a risk further material could come down. Geotechnical experts had assessed the site this week, which included abseiling parts of it, to see if it could be stabilised. In the Graham Valley, a section of road had been washed away by the river, almost right up to a cliff face. "It either has to be completely reinstated with some retaining walls and gabions which is a major cost, and that could take some time so it's not an easy fix. It'll probably take probably a month to six weeks at least before we can reinstate that." He said staff at the council were still trying to make contact with several homes in the Graham Valley North Branch Road, to check on their welfare and ascertain if they needed any supplies. Contractors were still working across the district to reopen roads, with around 30 closures still in place. That included the road over the Mārahau Hill, with four-wheel-drive access for residents and emergency services via Kaiteriteri. It hoped to have road access reinstated by Thursday. Network Tasman operations manager Robert Derks said power had been restored to most homes, after the second of two back-to-back storms cut electricity to around 3200 customers. Photo: RNZ / Mark Papalii Two homes on Riwaka-Sandy Bay Road remained without power after a pole and transformer were wiped out in the storm nearly two weeks ago. The pole was located at the bottom of a valley and was also taken out in ex-Tropical Cyclone Gita in 2018, so a more stable site had been found, with Network Tasman aiming to reinstate it and have power restored by the end of the week. Another five homes in Gannet Heights, Kaiteriteri, had been reliant on a generator after a slump in the road cut their power and Derks said that supply would also be reconnected in coming days. NZTA Waka Kotahi said work to repair a number of state highways across Nelson and Tasman would take some time, with disruptions and delays likely to continue in some places through until the end of the year. Top of the South regional manager Mark Owen said geotechnical and site assessments were still underway on roads across the region. Three sites on the Tākaka Hill, State Highway 60, required remedial work, with part of the highway expected to be reduced to a single lane under stop/go traffic management until the end of the year. Work is needed to repair, scour, slip, and washouts on State Highway 6 between Belgrove to Kohatu, and an underslip site at Coal Creek near Owen River. At Spooners Saddle, contractors would begin removing trees at risk of falling onto the highway from Wednesday, with the section of road under stop/go management to allow the trees to be removed safely. Owen said a temporary road surface will be put in place at Kohatu, ahead of a full rebuild of the highway planned for this summer. Contractors would also begin removing trees and other debris from underneath the Motueka River Bridge, as soon as water levels were low enough for diggers to operate in the riverbed. Meanwhile Chorus said it had postponed repairs to the damaged fibre cable at Lindsays Bridge in Tākaka ahead of more rain forecast for the top of the South Island next week. Rats chewed through the cable earlier this month, affecting 111 calls and internet and mobile coverage. A permanent fix was planned for Thursday night, but Golden Bay residents would not be able to contact 111 while the work is carried out. Chorus says the temporary fix has worked well in recent storms and it wants to give the community time to plan and prepare before any further disruption. Technicians would continue to monitor the temporary fix. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
2 days ago
- RNZ News
Cleaning up flood damage in Tasman and Marlborough
An example of some of the widespread damage to roads and infrastructure in the Nelson Tasman areas. Photo: Supplied/ Nick Smith More help to deal with the damage caused by flooding in Tasman and Marlborough is about to arrive in the form of the so-called "Enhanced Task Force Green." The government has activated funds which means those on benefits in the area can volunteer to assist and become part of the group working to reverse some of the damage. The Ministry for Social Development's Regional Commissioner for the area, Craig Churchill, says Enhanced Taskforce Green is entirely voluntary, but it will help those hit by flood damage and build skills for those taking part.
RNZ News
3 days ago
- RNZ News
This is the summer of flooding across the US, and scientists know why
By Andrew Freedman , CNN A man looks at a damaged road after severe flash flooding that occurred during the July 4 holiday weekend, in Hunt, Texas, on July 6. Photo: Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images via CNN Newsource Once synonymous with leisure and reprieve, summer has increasingly become a season marked by anxiety and disruption. Fossil fuel pollution - alongside other compounding factors - has transformed these months into a time of mounting peril, punctuated by relentless heat waves, rampant wildfires and catastrophic flooding. This summer, in particular, has been defined by a tragic surge in deadly flash floods across the United States, underscoring the escalating volatility of our warming world. It's no accident this is the summer of flooding, climate scientists say, with 100-year to 1,000-year deluges happening nearly simultaneously in multiple states on multiple days. Large parts of the US have seen an unusually humid summer with record amounts of moisture in the air. When cold fronts and other weather systems come along, that moisture can get wrung out, squeezed like a water-laden sponge, yielding heavy and often highly localized downpours. For much of the summer, the atmospheric conditions over the US have funneled humid air north from the unusually warm Gulf and western Atlantic, including the Gulf Stream, UCLA climate researcher Daniel Swain told CNN. This has yielded unusually high levels of moisture at all levels of the atmosphere across the US east of the Rockies, Swain said. It has led to record levels of what meteorologists call precipitable water, which is the amount of rain that would result from instantaneously extracting all the water in the air. This pattern has led to one flash flood after another. Omar Gutierrez, 31, helps clear debris from the inundated dining area of La Salsa Kitchen, a Mexican restaurant, after deadly flash flooding in Ruidoso, New Mexico, July 9. Photo: Paul Ratje/Reuters via CNN Newsource First and foremost, there was the devastating Texas flood that killed more than 130 people on the night of July 4. But flash flood events have been focused elsewhere as well. Three people were killed in a flash flood related to torrential rains falling on a wildfire burn scar in Ruidoso, New Mexico, on July 8. Some major roads in Chicago were suddenly under water when a 1,000-year rainfall event struck in early July. In portions of North Carolina, the remnants of Tropical Storm Chantal led to deadly heavy rain and flooding the same weekend as the Texas tragedy . In New York City, water rushed into the subway tunnels when the city saw its second-heaviest rainfall total in one hour on July 14, with widespread flash flooding lasting into the 15th. And this past week, it was Kansas City's turn to flood on July 17. Some of these floods resulted from rainfall that has a return frequency of about 1,000 years, meaning it has just a 0.1% chance of occurring in any given year. But climate change is loading the dice in favor of extreme precipitation. "When we talk about e.g. '1000 year' events, we're talking about the likelihood of these events in the absence of human-caused warming (i.e. how often we would expect them from natural variability alone)," said climate scientist Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania. "These events are of course much more frequent *because* of human-caused warming," he said in an email. But his research has identified other factors, such as persistent large-scale weather patterns known as "atmospheric resonance," that can make extreme weather, including floods, even more likely. Just as sound waves or ocean waves can resonate and reinforce each other, atmospheric resonance can happen to undulating jet stream patterns in the upper atmosphere, resulting in weather systems that stay in place for weeks. A recent study Mann worked on found such weather patterns have tripled in incidence since the mid-20th century during the summer months. The problem is these patterns are "not necessarily well-captured in climate models," he said. This increases uncertainty about future projections for extreme weather trends. The influence of climate change on heavy rainfall is most evident when it comes to short duration extreme events, like what has happened repeatedly this summer, according to Swain. "It is not average precipitation that really is most affected by climate change," Swain said. "It truly is mathematically correct that the more extreme the rain event, the clearer the connection to climate change is." Tropical Storm Chantal flooded central North Carolina with torrential rain, seen here in Chapel Hill on July 7. Photo: Peter Zay/Anadolu/Getty Images via CNN Newsource The physics of how global warming affects heavy precipitation events is well known, according to climate scientist Kate Marvel. "This is almost a textbook example of climate change impacts," she told CNN. "The science behind it is so basic you can see it in daily life. Warm water drives more evaporation - the bathroom gets much steamier after a hot bath than a cold one," she said. "Warm air contains more water vapor - a cold beer gets wet on the outside on a hot day, because when air comes into contact with the cooler surface, it has to condense out its water vapor," Marvel said. "Warm ground makes it easier for moist air to balloon upwards - this is why thunderstorms happen on hot summer afternoons. Put these all together, and you get the perfect conditions for torrential rain," said Marvel, author of the new climate book "Human Nature." "Whether a downpour turns into a catastrophic flood depends on a lot of things: how porous the ground is, the topography of the area, the people and things in harm's way. But there is absolutely no doubt that climate change, caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases, is making extreme rainfall more extreme." - CNN
