Kerre Woodham: Is relocating the only solution for flooding towns?

Remember late last year we were talking about the proposal to move Westport. The West Coast town has been repeatedly inundated by flooding since European settlement, but that's escalated in recent years. The Buller River flooded the town regularly - July 2021's Flood was particularly devastating.  

A draft master plan proposed relocating the town to farmland southwest of its current location, and we talked to one of the locals involved in planning the move, which isn't happening today, and it's not happening tomorrow but as part of a long-term relocation. We knew houses or commercial buildings need to be built. They won't be built on existing sites in the Township, but on the new land. So build it and they will come.  

Now another Township is bowing to the inevitable. The report has found that there is no viable long-term solution to prevent the frequent flooding of Kumeu, which is a gorgeous semi-rural township in northwest Auckland. As Rodney Local Board member Guy Wishart put it, there is no cavalry coming to save the town. He lost his Kumeu home in the 2023 floods and has moved to Helensville.  

The report outlined a history of flooding in Kumeu-Huapai stretching back to 1926. Since then, there have been five notable floods and more recently, floods in August 2021 and two floods in 2023. The report looked at possible solutions other than relocation. One of them was a $163 million dam upstream from the township, which, if it failed, “would have catastrophic impacts”, causing significant damage and risks to life.  

Well yes, if it failed, but you don't build dams expecting them to do so. And I think if you're saying it's $163 million, you can probably add another half of that on top. But according to local body councillors, there's no real alternative but to look at a managed retreat, relocate the town centre to an appropriate location, and for the council not to consent buildings and flood zones – which sounds like a no brainer, but it's happening everywhere.

Why would you be building on a flood zone where it's flooded and flooded and flooded again? The floods are nothing new, according to those who've lived in the area their whole lives. There was a great story in the Kumeu Courier where they spoke to a local and looked at the history of the floods. After the large floods in 1924 and 1926, the almost annual floods in Kumeu Township compelled the then Ministry of Works to use depression labour to build a stock bank on farmland South of the Kumeu River Bridge, which is still needed and still clearly visible today according to the Courier.

A local, who was a boy in the floods, said in 2021, the rainfall was 190 millimetres in 14 hours, but back in 1954 in the big flood he remembered, the rainfall was 150 millimetres in 5 1/2 hours. It was like a wall of water. And after the March 1954 floods, locals said, oh well, we're not going to see the like of that again. Six months later it rained for three days and three nights and created a second large flood in the same year.  

So things are not going to suddenly get better. If anything, it will only get worse. But what do you do when you've bought a house there, you're raising your family there, you've been through a couple of floods already, and you’re being told that the only possible solution is eventual relocation? How do you manage to spend your days there, knowing that every time it rains, you're going to be feeling sick? Knowing that long term you're going to have to leave your land, your home, your business behind?  

Is relocation the only possible solution as far as you can see, especially if you have lived there for some time? I'd really like to get your thoughts on this and for all of those towns, because this is not the only town, this is not the only settlement that is facing the issue of dealing with weather events that have always happened, there's a history of them happening, and they're only going to get more frequent overtime. Yes, the Council shouldn't have consented back in the day - they did. And we are where we are now. People who have homes, who have businesses who have livelihoods on land that ultimately is going to be covered in water.  

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