Unbeknown to us we lived in the Flockton Basin. One day, around 40 years after we moved there, the heavens opened and our grandchildren got a chance to canoe up our street. The water flooded through many people’s homes and some were destroyed. My garage flooded and when somebody pulled the plug on the water all the crap on the floor ran somewhere else. Everything has an upside.
The Council then undertook a major refit of the water systems in different parts of the city. Here’s what the Press reported in this article https://www.thepress.co.nz/nz-news/360675540/brilliant-job-new-council-infrastructure-spares-flood-prone-community-grief.
Any heavy rain used to leave a community in a nook of the Heathcote River with a knee-high lake for a road, but the council’s investment in stormwater infrastructure has changed everything, one resident says.
Graeme Small says people like to “grizzle” about the Christchurch City Council, but as a resident of Skylark Ln in Woolston for 28 years he has seen neighbours’ properties knocked down because of persistent flooding. His dry feet this time are proof the council’s efforts worked.
“I want to say thank you to the council, you’ve done a brilliant job. It’s made a hell of a difference,” he said.
The difference between last week’s floods and another major flood in 2014 ‒ besides Small no longer needing a 4WD to leave his property ‒ was a 109-hectare stormwater facility some 10km upstream.
Te Kuru, between Halswell and Westmorland, is home to wetlands and several basins which can ‒ and last week did ‒ hold a million cubic metres of water.
Well, it was the same in the Flockton Basin. There is a story about one guy in the Shirley Cricket team who was flooded three times in the Flockton Basin. His mates gave him a big plug to use next time it flooded. He’s now able to hang it on his garage wall.
The CCC also need a plug to be pulled in Wairewa/Forsyth so the ‘Little River’ Okana/Okuti does not flood the Little River village. CCC need to start listening to the locals and open the lake to the sea, BEFORE a storm, otherwise it’s like overflowing a half filled bath…..the lake is our storm water basin but it won’t work if it already full.