Families homeless as bridges hit
HTo watch a video report on this story, go to nzherald.co.nz West” clearfelling of forests on steep land.
Dramatic pictures issued by the Gisborne District Council showed a huge build-up of logs at many of the bridges.
Milner said some were willows and poplars, but most were “slash” — smaller branches left on forestry sites after the main tree trunks have been harvested,
“The bigger logs are from the forestry because you can see the chainsaw cuts, those are the ones that have jammed up on those bridges,” he said.
Ruatoria environmental consultant Tina Ngata said the forestry industry was “absolutely” to blame for the flood which forced the Mangatokerau family to evacuate their home. “The forestry industry on the East Coast is known as the Wild West of forestry,” she said.
“Our waterways have already paid the price, and we have paid the price with the lives of young men [forestry workers] from our families, and we are seeing this poor family paying the price and being absolutely traumatised because of the greed and the prioritisation of profit over the wellbeing of our land and now our
wellbeing, our safety.”
Gisborne resource management consultant Murray Palmer said clearfelling forestry should not be allowed on the steepest land.
“We have to look at it here because we are suffering more severe events regularly, and we do have the second- largest plantation forest area in the country,” he said.
“I would be really keen to work with the Gisborne District Council about how we can use Resource Management Act processes. I think that is making plantation forestry a discretionary activity on lands that are steep and vulnerable or where there are sensitive populations downstream.”
Long-serving former Gisborne District Conservator Trevor Freeman, who retired 18 months ago, said he was horrified by Forestry Minister Shane Jones’s plan to plant 1 billion trees because of the risk of expanding plantation forestry on vulnerable land. “There doesn’t seem to be a lot of thought about where they are going to be planted,” he said.
“Are we just going to be repeating the problems of the past by replanting some of the steepest land?”
However, Gisborne Mayor Meng Foon said the council had already imposed new conditions on resource consents for forest harvesting, requiring companies not to replant close to waterways, allowing native forest to grow up again to stop logs being washed away.
Damage from flood-borne logs prompts calls for an end to ‘Wild West’ clearfelling