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Morgane Solignac14:07, Jul 27 2021
Supplied
A slip on the Kenepuru Rd might be able to stop vehicles, but it can’t stop residents and their dogs.
As road workers continue to clear slip after slip on Marlborough’s Queen Charlotte Drive, another “incredible” Sounds community has been doing it for themselves while they wait for reinforcements to arrive. Relative newcomer to the Kenepuru Sound, Kathryn Curzon said the community response to the floods was “something to see”. The Kenepuru Rd had been closed since the region was first inundated with rain almost two weeks ago. Another dump of rain on Monday hadn’t caused any further damage, but was actually a good excuse for a lot of residents to have their first day off from working on the road since the flooding happened.
Friday, 23 July 2021, 4:08 pm
Local
residents on Queen Charlotte Drive express their gratitude
to road workers as the clean-up from the storm
continues.
If a region could be
measured by the compassion of its residents, Marlborough
would be off the scale, says Marlborough Mayor John
Leggett.
As a huge week of emergency response comes to
a close in the region, he took the opportunity to thank all
those involved in responding to last weekend’s storm.
“This has included several Council staff from Canterbury
who arrived in the past few days to shore up resources,”
said Mayor Leggett.
“It’s a good time for us to
STUFF
Rivers bursting their banks, flash floods and more intense cyclones. How climate change is making floods more extreme. “So that’s as far up the road as we got . and that alone is going to be quite a major fix,” Murrin said. A crew would need to cut a ramp into the side of the hole to get a digger in, to build a retaining wall for the hillside road. “It’s going to take some time. There will only be room for one digger, but there will be a lot of earth moving for that one digger, probably 1000 cubic metres of backfill. And we can’t run truck-and-trailers on this little road, it will be trucks only.”
“We’re not sure how much water got into the houses . The stop banks will be bomb-proof by the time we’re finished.” Marlborough Mayor John Leggett said the region’s civil defence team was conscious that more heavy rain could add more water to Marlborough s “already sodden soil”. More bad weather could affect Queen Charlotte Drive, which re-opened on Tuesday for the first time in three days with traffic measures, so workers could continue clearing slips. “Public safety is the only priority . Caution is key.” Leggett said the civil defence team was not yet sure how many houses had been damaged by the wild weather.