Breaching lockdown, for flour
People are flouting lockdown rules by driving across the windy Remutaka Hill Road to grab a bag of flour in the Wairarapa.
Sergeant Ian Osland, of Wairarapa Police, told Stuff supermarkets in South Wairarapa were reporting that people were driving from the Hutt Valley and Wellington to buy groceries on the other side of ranges.
‘‘They were saying they were having issues getting into their local supermarkets so they decided to drive ‘over the hill’,’’ Osland said.
‘‘That’s way out of the Prime Minister’s guidelines for travel.’’
‘‘If we come across someone who was in Featherston who lived in Lower Hutt, or whatever, then we would be having an educational chat with them and redirecting them home.’’
Osland said police staff had also come across vehicles coming into Wairarapa from the north along State Highway 2 from Tararua and Manawatu who seemed to have dubious reasons for travel. ‘‘We’re getting it from both sides.
‘‘Wairarapa only has two ways in and we can check what’s happening on the state highway corridors
‘‘Some of it is grocery related, some of them are saying they’ve got property they’ve gone to check somewhere, but on the face of it, looking at the condition and type of vehicle, their explanations fall a bit flat.’’
It seemed illogical that people were travelling long distances for groceries but they may have been looking for products they couldn’t find elsewhere such as flour, Osland said.
‘‘People are doing a lot more baking from home. It might be that flour is the reason they’ve driven to Featherston.’’
He said people shouldn’t be going from region to region because it made tracking and tracing positive coronavirus cases more difficult.
‘‘We’ll do what we can to limit the community spread of the virus so that we can all return back to a level of normality as quickly as possible.’’
But South Wairarapa Mayor Alex Beijen said he needed more evidence before getting to worked up.
He recently spent an hour staking out the main southern entrance to his district to see if there was much traffic that didn’t look like essential services.
‘‘More of an issue for us is that it’s Easter weekend coming up and are we going to see people coming over to holiday homes or baches.’’