Traffic flowed without a hitch for this year’s community firewood event on Rabbit Island, in stark contrast to last year’s chaos on the road.
Last year, traffic ground to a halt along the highway after Tasman District Council posted on Facebook that free firewood would be available on one day and hundreds of vehicles, many with trailers, headed out to Rabbit Island.
This year, the council used a registration and ticketing system with the help of Fifeshire Foundation and its partner organisations to give it to families in need. That meant single parents, older people, people on low incomes, parents navigating loss of employment, recovering from serious injuries and numerous other challenging situations.
A small number of remaining tickets were then made available on a first-in, first-served basis for Tasman.
In a bid to avoid the traffic jams of last year, the event took place during four two-hour slots across two days, with each ticketholder allocated a slot.
A council spokesperson, Tim O’Connell, says about 400 cubic metres of wood left over from harvesting was loaded onto 142 trailers or utes over the two days.
Each ticketholder paid $25 to take two cubic metres of firewood, raising $3,550 for the Fifeshire Foundation’s Winter Grants programme next year which helps families stay warm in winter.
The foundation’s winter grant scheme helped about 200 families this past winter with energy and firewood, exceeding 2023’s total of families by about a third.
He says those who received wood were grateful for the opportunity to access quality firewood, with funds going to a good cause. Following this year’s response, he says it could become an annual event.
This is the second year that waste wood has been chopped into rings and loaded onto trailers and utes.
Tim says the event is a way of dealing responsibly with waste forestry wood and had volunteers from PF Olsen, Downer, Fireshire Foundation and Steve Thompson Ltd to make it happen.
