Forestry under fire after landslips
Communities near Nelson, lashed by the tail end of tropical cyclone Gita, are demanding action on forestry practices that some residents say are dangerous and unsustainable.
Devastation caused by the storm, which hit a week ago, has left many people on edge in Marahau, the small community at the gateway to the Abel Tasman National Park.
‘‘It was the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen,’’ said Phil Reid, describing the moment when, mid-afternoon on February 20, part of a pine forest on the hill next to his house gave way.
‘‘I ran out of my back door and the whole gully was virtually moving past below me. And then part of the hill opposite me came crashing into it.
‘‘It was just a wall of logs and muddy water and huge boulders smashing together.’’
Reid said his house, several hundred feet above the flat, and about 4 kilometres inland from the coastal village of Marahau, shook with ‘‘the sheer force’’ of the landslide. He watched from his Otuwhero Valley Rd home, fearing for the safety of people below.
Residents on the flat were surrounded by mud, but escaped injury or major damage to their homes. ‘‘I actually just can’t believe no-one’s died,’’ said Marie Palzer who lives on the other side of the hill.
She had raced on to the paddocks below her family home, as a ‘‘tsunami of logs’’ crashed down the hillside, chasing her horses towards the road.
She described the forestry practices in the hills behind the family’s house as ‘‘shocking’’ and ‘‘lethal’’. ‘‘If they cleaned all this stuff up from the forestry, it wouldn’t be lying here now.
‘‘The amount of water ... no-one could control that. But the stuff lying around here, that could have been avoided.’’
Another resident, Mitch, said the landscape has been changed by silt. He viewed the damage from a hill by the Otuwhero Inlet, where a landslide in 2013 killed 63-year-old Jude Hivon.
‘‘The silting up [of rivers] is because of the forestry practice.’’
He said the last time something similar happened was in the 1970s; after trees had been harvested.
A petition was begun on Monday on change.org website by Motueka Valley resident James Griffiths, calling for stronger controls of forestry.
More than a thousand people had signed it by Tuesday.
The question needed to be asked whether forestry was the right thing to be doing on ‘‘highlyerodable, unstable hillside’’, Griffiths said. ‘‘It’s not unreasonable for people to expect that forestry is managed in a way that doesn’t cause a whole lot of harm to private property or damage to the environment.
‘‘It’s quite clear that that’s not happening and that the TDC [Tasman District Council] haven’t been strong enough in regulating the industry or enforcing what regulation there is.’’
A Tasman District Council spokesman said it believed some of the concerns would be addressed by a national environmental standard for plantation forestry, due to come into effect on May 1.