A dour mood hung above this year’s Stormwater New Zealand Conference, as attendees reflected on months of flooding and severe weather.<\/p>\n
“I need to apologise in advance for any recent trauma that this presentation might trigger,” Auckland Council’s Nick Brown said before playing a montage of the flood’s most destructive moments.<\/p>\n
The Regional Planning Manager reflected on gaps in communication that had some unwitting Aucklanders swimming through contaminated water.<\/p>\n
“This young person here,” he pointed out in one image, was “soaking wet not from the rainfall but because she and her mates decided swimming in raw sewage would be delightful”.<\/p>\n
Throughout the seven-day downpour, many Aucklanders did not understand the risks, he said.<\/p>\n
“People didn’t know, for example, that the Wairau pump station was broken and that the raw sewage of 70,000 people was discharging into the area.”<\/p>\n
Hawke’s Bay Regional Council’s Asset Management Group Manager, Chris Dolley, was similarly reflective in his speech.<\/p>\n
“There’s some hard lessons we need to learn.<\/p>\n
“Often when our technical specialists are providing advice… that advice isn’t always followed. In fact, some of our statutory mechanisms allow it to be readily challenged.<\/p>\n
“That’s something I think we need to work through.”<\/p>\n
Other speakers were more concerned by the future.<\/p>\n
Source RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A dour mood hung above this year’s Stormwater New Zealand Conference, as attendees reflected on months of flooding and severe weather. “I need to apologise in advance for any recent trauma that this presentation might trigger,” Auckland Council’s Nick Brown said before playing a montage of the flood’s most destructive moments. The Regional Planning Manager […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":4888,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4887","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=4887"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4889,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4887\/revisions\/4889"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}