Chris Hipkins visited Weka Peckers Recycling outside Motueka the day before Friday’s inundation in the Tasman District, to observe the damage from the first bout of severe weather on 27 June.
The business recovers, reuses and recycles materials before landfill, and it was waterlogged, with half a metre of water in most areas.
It left significant damage to stock kept in containers and items “floating” in the car park.
Merv Hall, who owns the centre with Ricarda Scherschel, says an estimated $40,000 clean-up job lay ahead with items up for discarding due to possible contact with contaminated water.
A topic on Merv and the Labour Party leader’s lips at his fleeting visit centred around the recent expert group’s recommendations to the government that landowners need to be responsible for managing future risks associated with weather events like flooding.
Merv says Weka Peckers was in a high flood zone, but it was consented by Tasman District Council to be a recycling yard, and it was ideally situated next to the Motueka Resource Recovery Centre.
He says any new owner who is given responsibility for ill-considered choices of previous entities would be “unfair”.
Chris says his position on the expert group’s recommendations was that it shouldn’t be left to the homeowners alone to manage the risks.
“If houses have been built in places where they have been consented, then there is some responsibility around central and local government accepting their share of responsibility for that,” he says.
Chris says it was a “really challenging” time for the Tasman District.
“When we were in government, we dealt with Cyclone Gabrielle and set aside $6 billion of funding to start that process around greater resilience, greater recovery from these sorts of events,” he says.
“The current government took that funding away, and I think that they’re going to regret that.”
