The West Coast Regional Council is not backing down in its campaign to have Bailey bridges kept in its area, despite a brush-off from the NZ Transport Agency.
NZTA stores the temporary bridge units at Burnham near Christchurch and sends them around the country as needed in emergencies, like the floods that devastated Hawke’s Bay in Cyclone Gabrielle.
But the West Coast regional transport committee wants some bridges stored west of the Alps, so they can be deployed more swiftly when disaster strikes.
But NZTA has turned down their initial request to locate a bridge or two on the Coast.
At a council meeting last week, transport committee chairman Peter Ewen described the NZTA response as "nonsense".
"The argument that [the bridges] have to be kept over there because of rust here ... it’s a precious argument. We had a contractor in Stillwater prepared to store them in a good location, free of charge."
The council voted to tackle NZTA again about keeping some of the bridges in the region.
Cr Allan Birchfield was a dissenting voice, arguing the Coast atmosphere was "not good" and the bridges were better kept in one central location.
Speaking to LDR after the meeting, Cr Ewen said the idea that Bailey bridges would rust away on the West Coast was "rubbish".
In decades past, the Ministry of Works had stored Bailey bridges on the Coast without damage, he said.
"But the main argument is that if we have an event here and the [mountain] passes are out, we’ll be three days waiting before they get across from Burnham."
There were multiple bridges on State Highway 6 that runs the length of the Coast and the loss of just one in a flood could create mayhem for Civil Defence, he warned.
Between Greymouth and Hokitika there were five bridges, some built in the 1940s or 1950s, that were never designed to take today’s heavy trucks, Cr Ewen said.
Some were starting to show signs they were failing, he said.
SH6 was a West Coast lifeline in emergencies.
"If there’s one connection we have to protect, it’s the one between Greymouth with the hospital and Hokitika with the airport, and we can’t afford to wait three days in a disaster."
He and others would raise the Bailey bridge issue again with NZTA at a meeting this week in the hope it would reconsider, he said.
Persistence had paid off recently with the news the West Coast was about to gain four bulk fuel storage tanks for use in civil defence emergencies, Cr Ewen said.
"We’ve been asking the government for that for about 10 years — finally it’s happened."
West Coast Emergency Management head Claire Brown said the new fuel tanks were coming from Hawke’s Bay, where they were installed after the cyclone but were no longer needed.
• LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.
By Lois Williams
