West Coast leaders yesterday urged action and stressed the reputational risk of losing the SH6 lifeline.
One operator alone is losing $30,000 a day.
While tourists can get to the glaciers from Hokitika, they have to backtrack and return the same way.
Businesses, who have warned for more than a decade about the risk posed by the slip at Epitaph Cutting, just south of Knights Point, are very frustrated.
Large cracks appeared in the road directly above the slip on Saturday.
Minister for Emergency Management Mark Mitchell was on the Coast on Saturday during the state of emergency declared in South Westland.
"I’m not going to sit on my laurels," Westland Mayor Helen Lash said.
"I want action and I want it now."
Development West Coast chief executive Heath Milne said the closure essentially cut out the loop around the Coast — the main route for tourists.
Some people who still travelled to the glaciers would not be motivated to go any further south, as they could only get as far as Lake Moeraki.
The slip and cracking was a symptom of the investment that was required in infrastructure that "we just haven’t seen in recent years", he said.
"The potential for the road to be cut off has been there and understood for some time.
"There has not been a plan."
West Coast Regional Council chairman Peter Haddock, attending a transport meeting in Christchurch yesterday morning, said when the highway was out, the region lost $1m a day, ramping up to $3m in peak season.
They had been "beating the drum" about the Epitaph Cutting slip site for years, meeting ministers and on site with NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA) officials.
The fear was the West Coast would become too hard for tour bus companies.
Some of the 56 guests at Lake Moeraki Wilderness Lodge — isolated between two slips — left in a convoy on Sunday to negotiate their own way over a slip across the road at Lake Moeraki, while others flew out by helicopter.
"The glacier townships will be incensed," lodge owner Gerry McSweeney said.
"People will be cancelling their whole West Coast trip.
"People will go down the east coast, and give the West Coast the flick."
The eco-lodge was fully booked this month and so was losing about $30,000 a day.
"Surely someone has done some planning if you go inland ... we all recognised there was this incredible bottleneck."
NZTA system manager Mark Pinner said there were two significant issues — the cracking in the road at the southern end of the Epitaph site, and the rockfall above the road at the northern end.
A rock-scaling crew was setting up on site yesterday, while another contractor cleared debris from the rockfall at the northern end. — Greymouth Star
