Fear at students’ highway dash
After heavy rain, students Max Francis and Sarah Lane toss up whether to get their feet wet in a flooded underpass or dash across a state highway to reach their school bus.
Sarah, 16, said more than 10 students faced that same dilemma to get from the Mapua side of State Highway 60 to the bus stop on the other side of the road for the trip to their schools in Richmond or Nelson.
‘‘Some are only in year 9,’’ she said. ‘‘Some aren’t that careful either,’’ 16-year-old Max added.
That section of SH60 is a 100kmh zone and has barriers on both sides of the road that also need to be negotiated. However, some children take that risk on days the Dominion Rd underpass is flooded including, at times, Sarah and Max.
‘‘You don’t want to have wet socks and shoes,’’ Max said.
Sarah said it wasn’t practical to wear gumboots because students would have to lug them around school for the day.
‘‘One time, my dad was going to piggyback me [through the underpass] but the water came up to calf level.’’
After Sarah’s mum, Anne Lane, learnt her daughter had crossed the road to avoid the wet underpass, she started driving Sarah to the bus stop after heavy rain.
However, not all parents were available to take their children, she said.
‘‘They have only two choices: walk through the underpass and spend the day in wet socks and shoes or skirts and trousers, or take a chance on the traffic.’’
Lane said at 7.30am when the bus left, the traffic could be heavy. Vehicles heading towards Nelson had just descended a rise at that point and were often travelling faster than 100kmh.
‘‘It’s more like 110kmh,’’ she said. ‘‘The thought of one of them being hit, frankly, scares me witless. One day, someone is going to trip.’’
The Dominion Rd underpass caters for stormwater and pedestrians with a water channel on one side and a footpath at a higher level on the other.
Lane this month took her concerns to Tasman District Council, pleading in the public forum for a solution.
‘‘My concern is primarily for the safety of the children,’’ she told councillors. ‘‘They should not have to risk their lives to get to college but that’s exactly what they do every day that they can’t use the underpass.’’
Lane suggested the installation of a gravel trap upstream or the construction of a raised pedestrian platform to keep the children above any excess water.
However, transportation manager Jamie McPherson later reported back to councillors, saying the amount of water that flowed through the underpass in a flood was ‘‘quite significant and there’s no easy options to, for example, raise the footpath level or try and stop water covering the footpath’’.
McPherson said he understood that drainage was the primary reason for the underpass.
‘‘Pedestrian access is secondary,’’ he said. ‘‘We’re going to make sure that we get in and ... clean it up as quickly as we can for future events.’’
Moutere-Waimea Ward councillor Anne Turley suggested an arrangement be found with the Education Ministry for an alternative stop in stormy periods ‘‘so they don’t have to use the underpass’’.
Deputy mayor Tim King, who is also a Moutere-Waimea Ward councillor, said the council definitely had to have ‘‘the conversation with the Education [Ministry] to say it’s not really acceptable’’.
McPherson said the council did not have much influence over the way the ministry contracted its bus services ‘‘but we can still try’’.