On Wednesday, Mayor Mah\u00e9 Drysdale announced that Tauranga is moving to a “transition period” for a month, focusing on assessing damage and making plans for what reopening Mauao looks like.<\/p>\n
The mayor said any decisions on the future of the land surrounding the landslide will require conversations with iwi, communities, and people closely affected by the tragedy.<\/p>\n
“We’ve got a number of conversations to have with the families of those that lost loved ones, because we also want to be respectful and understand what they’d like to see,<\/p>\n
“I think I can probably confidently say we don’t have a campground where the slip happened, we got to make some decisions around what we do with that land and how we remember this very tragic event,” he said.<\/p>\n
Access to Mauao is restricted, and cordons remain along parts of Marine Parade and Adams Avenue, as geotechnical experts assess conditions.<\/p>\n
Drysdale said the current focus is to mitigate risks around the Mount Maunganui landslip, so that businesses nearby can open before the Waitangi weekend.<\/p>\n
Tauranga Mayor Mah\u00e9 Drysdale.\u00a0<\/span>Photo:\u00a0Calvin Samuel \/ RNZ<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n He said three businesses remain closed on Adams Avenue, but he’s hopeful that they can safely open by Friday.<\/p>\n Drysdale said shipping containers have been put in as a precaution, and more work will be done on Thursday to stabilise the land.<\/p>\n “By putting these mitigations in place, and this is always subject to geotechnical advice, we’re confident that we can make it safe enough that we’re happy to open that,” he said.<\/p>\n Drysdale said businesses have had a hard time since the tragedy, and he hopes that visitors can still come and support them during the Waitangi weekend.<\/p>\n “We hope that people still come down to the area and support these businesses, this was a natural disaster and no doing of themselves, but they have been caught in the crossfire, so we’re doing what we can to support them,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Tauranga mayor said any decisions on the land immediately surrounding the fatal Mount Maunganui landslide will be months away, but feels it is unlikely that the area will remain a campsite in the future. Six people died\u00a0after a section of the maunga collapsed into a campground during the extreme weather event two weeks ago. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":16547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16546"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16548,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16546\/revisions\/16548"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}