And a very lucky railway bridge

ment commission, they’d get in the diggers and clear all of this out and keep it clear, so the water could get away.

‘‘It’s going to keep happening. If the council come to the party and do two-thirds, onethird or something to clear all these out, and then it’s the landowner’s responsibility to spray any regrowth, then we can get rid of the willows, and they won’t be bouncing back like that.

‘‘But now they don’t, and they’re [streams and rivers] full of willows, and they create obstructions for the debris, and it forms a barrier, and it forces the level of the flood water up and that means it overflows into the paddocks and the fences that people have put up to try and keep the animals out of the creek, and it just destroys them.’’

Elliot said the Resource Management (Stock Exclusion) Regulations 2020 was brought in to help protect New Zealand’s waterways from pollution, but had only made matters worse.

The regulations state that all stock must be excluded from the beds of lakes, rivers and wetlands, and must not be on land closer than 3 metres to the bed of rivers and lakes.

Elliot said that the new regulations had created their own problems when it came to flooding, as he had lost an estimated 6km of electric fencing that would have to be taken down and re-erected by hand.

‘‘The whole place is fenced as the regulations require us to have it to keep the stock out of the water, but it’s futile, because it does this,’’ Elliot said, pointing to hundreds of metres of downed fencing.

‘‘We’re just not managing the waterways correctly. It’s becoming conditional that farmers fence their waterway because otherwise they get into trouble, it just doesn’t make sense,’’ Elliot said.

Elliot said that if help wasn’t forthcoming, some farmers may stop re-erecting waterway fencing that had been destroyed by floods.

‘‘It’s about future management of the waterways, fenced off waterways, but you’re not going to get any buy-in from farmers if we’ve got to keep replacing without any input from either local or central government.’’

In the meantime, with no staff to help out or insurance to cover the cost, Elliot had the task of starting the major clean-up on his own.

‘‘You either do it yourself or get extra labour in, but it gets to the stage where it’s such an absolute mess that you’d might as well get a digger in, clear it up and just build a whole new fence, but what kind of fence do you build when it’s going to happen again, and again?

‘‘It’s all electric fencing, I’m dreading this. You just scratch your head and think ‘where am I going to start?’ ’’