After undertaking almost 200 infrastructure fixes for Cyclone Hale, and nearly 170 for Cyclone Gabrielle, Carterton District Council [CDC] is now seeking millions of dollars of central government funding to cover the cost.
A raft of other routine work has also been done, including pothole repairs, unsealed road and drainage maintenance, and bridge inspections.
The information was presented to the council’s policy and projects committee in a report by infrastructure services manager Johannes Ferreira, as part of a comprehensive update on recent roading and infrastructure work.
The report said 195 contractor jobs had been done relating to Cyclone Hale, and 169 for Gabrielle.
“For the Cyclone Hale event, we requested a $4.9 million value for the permanent repairs and a value of $190,000 for the initial response,” the report said.
“We have made good progress, especially with storm damage we have experienced. Progress has been good on Te Wharau Rd and Clifton Grove. The team has also been continuing with routine maintenance and getting ready for the [road] sealing season hopefully to start around November,” Ferreira said.
Additional funding is available from Waka Kotahi when unusual damage has been shown, he explained.
“Within the emergency event working category, Waka Kotahi supports us with additional FAR [funding assistance rates] when we can show hardship. How that is calculated is when we experience storm or any type of damage in excess of 10 per cent of our annual total budget. Everything after that normally qualifies for an additional 20 per cent,” Ferreira said.
“In extreme events, like in the last financial year with Gabrielle and Hale, we were also given an additional 20 per cent over and above. So [we’re] sitting on 91 per cent for some of the repairs.”
There has been a substantial standard maintenance programme undertaken as well as the storm repairs.
In August alone, the report said 110 potholes in the network were fixed, as well as edge break failures on Ponatahi Rd, Lincoln Rd, and Kokotau Rd.
Pavement repairs on Admiral Rd and East Taratahi Rd were also done.
“We inspected 152km of sealed roads in the network, and all roads that we inspected were programmed based on the routine maintenance inspection category,” the report said.
Unsealed road inspection and grading were major categories of work done.
“During August we graded 131km of unsealed roads. We inspected 529km of unsealed roads during the month of August.”
In addition, 39 drainage assets and 11 bridges in the district were inspected and other minor repairs were undertaken.
“The stormwater channels on Buchanan Rd, Te Awa Rd, and Admiral Rd were cleaned.”
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What about finishing widening the northern end of Hughes line 🤔 . It’s a failure of your traffic management system to only widen the least used southern end of Hughes line a totally mismanaged traffic safety issue 😑.