Otago workers pushing hard to remove water
Work to remove 35 million cubic metres of unwanted water is under way in Otago.
The Lower Taieri Flood Protection Scheme is designed to restrict excess water to natural ponding areas on the Taieri Plain, Otago Regional Council engineering, hazards and science director Gavin Palmer said.
Staff and contractors were now working around the clock to ‘‘dewater’’ those flooded areas after last weekend’s storm brought two months worth of rain in just two days.
They were using heavy duty pumps sourced from around the country, as well as the council’s six permanent pump stations.
‘‘The priority at the moment is to get water off land,’’ Palmer said.
It was estimated the upper ponding area of the Lower Taieri held some 35m cubic metres of water – almost at its capacity – at the peak of the storm.
The ponding helped prevent more water from flooding the small town of Henley though, and stopped the creation of more issues along the Taieri River.
The area was now about 40 per cent full of water and ‘‘falling very quickly’’.
Concerns over a potential stopbank collapse at Mill Creek, which would cause the Taieri River to flow into a large rural area, prompted an evacuation during the weekend’s storm.
‘‘It was a serious situation; if that floodbank had failed we would have have had ... extensive inundation,’’ Palmer said.
The concerns were alleviated with the help of territorial soldiers who were in Dunedin for training.
They helped place sandbags and successfully stemmed the flow of water.
Palmer said water was held back on the Taieri River until the peak of the storm, with the controlled spill gates then opened.
The rainfall did not hit the upper Taieri catchment, sparing a ‘‘second peak’’ of flooding hitting the already sodden area, he said.
He noted baleage impeded drainage in some places, which might prompt a response from the regional council on the matter.
Some of the gravity-fed drains had to be cleared of bales of silage before they could operate effectively.