Flying to tech festival’s rescue

With State Highway 6 destroyed by slips and slumps, a chartered flight over the Whangamoas this week has ‘‘saved our bacon’’, organisers of a tech festival say.

The Empower Te Rangapikiko¯ tuku esports and Coding Festival was set to start tomorrow at the ASB Theatre in Blenheim, and festival organisers said they couldn’t rely on the road to Nelson being reopened in time for a group of key people to make the event.

Both roads between Blenheim and Nelson remained closed yesterday, after a deluge of rain caused damage to SH6 and SH63.

Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency acting national maintenance and operations manager Mark Owen said on Monday that it could take up to a week for those roads to open, given the extent of the damage was still unknown.

‘‘We have no idea when the road may get reopened, and obviously there’s a decent chance that it won’t [before Thursday],’’ Marlborough Chamber of Commerce general manager Pete Coldwell said.

The chamber had organised the festival in collaboration with iwi, industry, schools and tertiary institutions across Marlborough, Nelson/tasman and the West Coast.

Coldwell said after hearing of the highway closures, the organising team realised a group of seven event speakers and workshop facilitators from Nelson probably would not be able to make it to the festival.

That’s when they reached out to Blenheim-based airline

Sounds Air, ‘‘to see if they might be able to come to the rescue’’.

The airline came back ‘‘straight away’’ to say they could help, Coldwell said.

The cost of the charter flight would be coming from the festival budget, but Coldwell said the fact that Sounds Air managed to get things sorted so quickly, had ‘‘saved our bacon’’.

Some of the passengers set to arrive in Blenheim tomorrow would be in charge of workshops at the event, including a virtual reality and augmented reality workshop, where young people would have the chance to create their own virtual reality app, and a robotics workshop, which would allow attendees to design their own aqua bots or drones.

Coldwell said the event organising team was still hoping some young people set to come over from Nelson and the

West Coast would be able to make it, ‘‘but at the moment we just don’t know’’.

‘‘This is going to become the biggest student event across Te Tauihu [the top of the south], open to every intermediate and senior school in Marlborough, Nelson, Tasman and the West Coast, so to deliver the inaugural event was crucial.

‘‘It’s too important for the rangitahi [young people] of the regions and for business for it not to go ahead,’’ he said.

Sounds Air chief executive Andrew Crawford said yesterday that Sounds Air was looking at putting on a daily flight between Blenheim and Nelson while the highways were out of action.