Flooding a brine state of affairs
MANY people driving via Portsmouth Dr to the Edgar Centre on Monday night this week had to negotiate some significant flooding at the intersection with Teviot St, surprising considering it hadn’t rained all day.
Well, not that surprising actually, given the roads there are often inundated whenever there are big tides. But why can’t this longstanding problem be fixed, I wondered?
Then reader Jack Crawford pointed out in an email, this flooding is not good for cars. He writes:
‘‘Over the past few days, there have been king tides with the resultant upwelling of seawater from the drains adjacent to Portsmouth Dr and in Marne St. The DCC have been putting out signage stating the obvious — ‘flooding’. But how many motorists realise that they are actually driving through deep salt water — and why do the signs not warn them of that fact? Doh! Perhaps it is another facet of a cunning campaign by the DCC to more quickly rid the city of old clunkers, in the belief that they will quickly rust into oblivion.’’
We put this to the DCC and group manager transport Richard Saunders said high tides and more frequent severe weather events do cause problems in some areas of the city where the level of the road is lower, as it is at this corner.
‘‘There is no easy fix, but staff are looking at options to see what could be done to limit surface flooding.’’
Fast food facts
Thanks mainly to a phone call from Joan Sims, we have been able to find reader Norman Edwards a definitive answer to his question yesterday about when the first Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet appeared in Dunedin.
It was on Wednesday, August 22, 1973, when the American franchise opened at the corner of Andersons Bay Rd and Oxford St and yes, it seems to have been the city’s first international fast food retailer.
Joan had worked out the year because she remembered her then 12yearold daughter Jo had entered a treasure hunt promotion run in conjunction with the KFC opening, when one of the items she had to find was a ‘‘straight banana’’.
Joan said they found a ‘‘pretty straight’’ banana and her daughter’s reward was a huge family box of fried chicken with all the trimmings — and very nice it was too!
Once we had established the year of the opening, a search of old ODT photos yielded today’s picture showing the building and the month it was taken.
The Andersons Bay shop was the first KFC outlet in the South Island — there were seven in the North Island already — and the first local manager was Frank Cater.
The outlet was officially opened by the Mayor, Sir Jim Barnes, and the Bayfield Jaycees organised a special ‘‘meals on wheels’’ promotion the next day for 160 of Dunedin’s senior citizens — chicken lunchboxes, of course.
Pizza Hut’s arrival
Another reader, John Kerr, has provided a date for the city’s first Pizza Hut outlet. He writes:
‘‘During a period of about 18 months ending in March 1982, I was administration manager for Pizza Restaurants (NZ) Ltd and based in their head office in Carbine Rd, Mt Wellington, in Auckland. At the time I joined I recall that Dunedin’s first Pizza Hut in Great King St was under construction and think it was NZ Pizza Hut No 12 and would have opened during 1981.
‘‘There was always a high turnover of Hut staff, since many were students, but I am sure that former Dunedin staff members may be able to pinpoint the opening date. I know that when we moved to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, in March 1982, the Queenstown Pizza Hut had recently opened, to total about 16 NZ restaurants in all, with at least another eight under construction or in the planning stage.’’
Old soldier photo
Now, if John Kerr’s name sounds familiar to readers that’s
because earlier this week, on behalf of a Timaru reader, we published a portrait of a World War 1 soldier, John Farquhar Kerr, of Dunedin, in an attempt to find one of his descendants.
And who should contact us but John jun, as the picture was of his dad. John says he got a ‘‘big surprise’’ to open the ODT and see his father’s photo in The Wash.
John Kerr sen, who fought in both the bloody Gallipoli and Somme campaigns, had earlier survived on the way to the war when his troopship, Southland, was torpedoed by German submarine UB14 on September 23, 1915.
No wonder John describes his father as ‘‘one of the lucky ones’’, and fittingly, perhaps, it should, be noted he died in Dunedin, aged 76, on Anzac Day 1970.
My thanks to readers for a great response to many topics in the column this week. We will catch up with those followups next week.