NZ News
Cyclone Gabrielle: Transport infrastructure repairs not a clean-cut task
The big job of repairing the roads and bridges comes with big decisions for central and local authorities – which ones get fixed first?
The work is not easy and it is not clean.
At Pakowhai, a handful of the 140 Downer staff across the Hawke’s Bay region – all virtually now fully engaged on post-cyclone work – are grading and scraping a carapace of mud off the chipseal.
As the mud was drying in the 27 Celsius degree heat on Tuesday, it was giving off a fair bit of odour – and a lot more dust as trucks and cars churned along the long, straight, main Pakowhai Road.
Now reopened, it was busy and dustier than it has ever been.
Out on the side roads between the orchards, it was even noisier and even dustier.
A dirty yellow grader was making a heavy din, its blade pushing through and leaving behind it a dark brown twirl of mud hundreds of metres long and as high in places as your knees.
Rex Davies was on the grader, Derrick Theobald on the loader.
Derrick Theobald was on the loader, clearing up debris on the edges of the roads in Hawke’s Bay after Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo: RNZ / Phil Pennington
“Just clearing up the edges of the roads and the roadsides for the public, yep, nah, it’s going all right,” Theobald said.
“He’s a legend on the grader,” said Theobald of Davies.
“Oh, I don’t know about that, just doing my job,” Davies came back.
A job that is requiring a lot of patience. Utes, some laden with pumps, or little yellow diggers, or endless rubbish, and a few cars, trundle up and down Allen Road, getting in the grader’s way, from Pakowhai Road out to where the road doglegs up against the Tūtaekurī River stopbank.
Rex Davies was on the grader, helping smooth out Hawke’s Bay road surfaces after Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo: RNZ / Phil Pennington
Andrew Tunoho, further up Allen Road, was on a big yellow digger, its big bucket down in the gloop, scraping it here and there gently, so as not to damage the seal.
“Just gotta be careful, working under those wires with a digger this size, gotta be careful,” Tunoho said.
Oliver Postings can drive a digger – but not like that.
“I could drive one but I wouldn’t put me in charge of one,” said the Hawke’s Bay manager of Downer.
“The last thing you want to do is rip the road up while he’s cleaning the silt,” Postings said.
“So there’s some skill to just moving enough mud to make it safe to drive on but not ripping the road up so it falls apart when it rains next.”
Care for the road is requiring care for the people, with Postings’ major theme being managing fatigue.
Also, exposure to the foul dust is a problem on what may now be New Zealand’s dustiest worksite.
Despite the difficulties, Postings said they had managed to clear most of the side roads, maybe 10km all up towards the stopbanks.
Drains, too, the unsung heroes supporting roads, needed clearing of wood, roofing steel, apple trees, and the odd living room settee carried there by floodwaters that, going by the evidence left on the roadside hedges, and damage to ceilings inside the houses, topped 2.5 metres.
Tricky priorities
Work on the hard-hit State Highway 5 through Esk Valley in Hawke’s Bay. Photo: Supplied / NZTA
Before the side roads were worked on, the main road and other arterials were the priorities.
The trickier priorities looming ahead are the number of destroyed bridges further out of town.
“There’s been aerial surveillance to assess them but some of them are difficult to get to, apart from the ones in the urban areas where we can see that impact,” Postings said.
“We’ve got to clear the road to be able to get to where the previous bridge was.
“We’ve got to assess the approaches and make sure that you can actually rest the Bailey bridge on solid ground on either side.”
Because Waka Kotahi owns the country’s stocks of Bailey bridge parts, it was now a central government choice of where to put them first.
“I believe that the first priority is Tiniroto [near Wairoa] and Rissington [northwest of Napier] but I don’t have that confirmed,” said the Downer manager.
“As soon as we get there, we’ll be straight into it.”
Twirls of graded mud, scraped sideways in Hawke’s Bay on the roads. Photo: RNZ / Phil Pennington
On the local roads, councils set the priorities – with a lot of input from the likes of Downer. A small council such as Tararua district, has no choice, when it has 50 roads to fix.
Contractors busy before were “even busier” now, Postings said.
“But this is our focus, we’ll put stuff on hold that’s not important at the moment and focus on delivering this task.”
If they could not get resources locally, they would go outside the region and pull in people – or gear.
“There’s particular types of small dump trucks that we’ve had to bring in. There weren’t any in Hawke’s Bay,” Postings said.
“So we’ve pretty much gone to one of our suppliers, who’s taken it off the shop floor and brought it up here to help at the Transpower site – and that was one phone call,” he said.
“It was shiny and new. It’s not so shiny and new now.”
Source: RNZ
Latest News
Opportunities to mitigate multi-million-dollar RNZ budget blowout likely missed – experts
Multiple opportunities to identify and mitigate a multi-million-dollar budget blowout at RNZ appear have been missed, according to the former executive director at Audit New Zealand.
The public broadcaster on Monday revealed a near $12 million shock financial loss after a litany of financial blunders, which will now lead to sweeping job cuts.
The $11.8m loss is more than 25 times the $470,000 RNZ had expected to lose over the year to June.
CEO Paul Thompson took responsibility for the result, and said internal reports gave an inaccurate picture of the finances, meaning the scale of the loss only became clear in October.
RNZ’s former chief financial officer Hilary Parker resigned unexpectedly in early October.
The board said it would commission an independent review into what went wrong.
Independent contractor Stephen Walker, who left the Audit Office earlier this year, said the size of the loss was surprising, as was the length of time it took to identify it – months after the financial year ended.
Supplied / OAG
“Probably more of a concern is that they had seemingly been unaware that they were running up a significant deficit until they were in the preparation stage of their annual report in October.”
Walker said public entities typically produced monthly financial reports.
An interim audit also took place before the end of the financial year, he said, but if the organisation hadn’t identified significant losses at that stage, the auditor could also be in the dark.
“It seems that there’s a real weakness in forecasting and budgeting that’s occurred here and that the monthly accounts, when they’re produced, either haven’t identified these significant variances against budget or the magnitude of them really hasn’t come to light until right towards the end of the financial year,” Walker said.
“And really at that point, there’s no opportunity for the chief executive, the leadership team to take, and the board to take, any corrective action because the year has effectively been completed.”
Walker said the “significant miss” was difficult to account for given it was more than 10 percent of RNZ’s total funding.
He said based on RNZ’s annual report, financial complexity didn’t appear to be a factor.
“This $11.8m loss isn’t made up of one particular item … it seems to have been contributed to by a number of separate expense lines running over budget. So I don’t think it’s necessarily to do with complexity.”
Among the errors, RNZ wrongly counted $2m from land sales as income in its budget. Staff costs also came in $3.2m over budget, including $1.4m in redundancy payments.
Professor at Auckland University’s business school Norman Wong said based on media reports the issues identified were “significant and troubling”.
Supplied / University of Auckland
“But recognising the sale of land as income in their budget is a basic error that one would have expected to have been caught and corrected well before it got to this point.”
With funding reductions at RNZ over the past two years, Walker expected greater scrutiny of financial results.
“Virtually every public entity has had their annual budget reduced. And so you would expect … the leadership team on a monthly basis and board – I’m not sure how frequently the board will consider the information – but you would expect them to be interrogating the results on a regular basis throughout the year,” he said.
Walker said initiating an independent review was the correct course of action and that he’d want to understand what information the leadership team and the board were regularly receiving.
He said he’d “love to say” surprising financial results were rare, but conceded they occured on a semi-frequent basis during his time leading the Audit Office.
“The benefit of independent scrutiny by the Audit Office – and the auditors providing that support to the Auditor General – [is] that the reporting is fairly presented at the end of the year, whether it’s good, bad or ugly.”
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