OFFICIAL SURVEY

Evening Post, Volume CXXXII, Issue 83, 4 October 1941, Page 10

OFFICIAL SURVEY

A SPECIAL LOAN?

MEETINGS ON MONDAY

This morning the Mayor, Mr. Hislop, the chairman, Councillor W. Appleton, and members of the works committee, with the City Engineer, Mr. K. E. Luke, assistant engineers, and the City Solicitor, Mr. J. O'Shea, made a rapid inspection of localities and properties, from one end of the city to the other, damaged by the rainstorm. Rapid though it was, to a schedule arranged by the engineers, it took nearly three hours, and then only a sample, as it were, could be taken, for the damage is far more widespread and more serious in the total than it appeared yesterday. The estimate of cost of repairs, public, private, and semi-private, has climbed now to from £80,000 to £100,000, and those figures again are likely to be low rather than high. On Monday' afternoon the works committee will hold a special meeting to talk over their observations today and to discuss such preliminary reports as may be available and in the evening the full council will meet as the finance committee. Naturally no councillor was definite today, but the impression gained was that the work of repair and the affording of assistance to the many property owners whose homes have been damaged will necessitate the raising of a special loan. This, presumably, will be a main point discussed by the finance committee. J ASSISTANCE TO HOUSEHOLDERS.! The^damage to roads, paths, walls, | and embankments which are the direct concern of the council is difficult enough,' both as regards money and the present practical impossibility of getting men for the work, but the case of many home-owners is tragic. Homes that are flooded and left filthy with silt and slush are scattered through all the suburbs —Karori, Wadestown, Kaiwarra, Island Bay, Newtown, Melrose, Oriental Bay; there are more against which slips of rock or sodden clay and earth have piled; there is another where a retaining wall —solid, but not well designed—has been crushed on to and partly through the walls; others are left on the brink of banks and cliffs. There are scores of disappearances of access paths. In some cases the repairs will cost £60 or thereabouts, but in others the repair bills will just about bankrupt the owners. What the council will decide about the help to be given will probably also be discussed on Monday. ' Already it has certain powers, but additional powers may have to be obtained. The opinion of those who visited the flood areas today was, seemingly without exception, that some assistance must be given to those put so unexpectedly and hardly up against it. HOMES BUILT ON BAD LAND. Another sort of authority may also be sought after this experience: it' is to the end of giving the council power to refuse to permit homes or buildings to be put up on land that carries the I risk and liability of a. repetition of what happened in the last two days. Always there will be people who will take^ a risk because a section is cheap or because the locality seems to offer some particular advantage to that individual, or for any other reason; each case would have to be considered by itself. ■ But there are other stretches of land in some of the suburbs- which are shown by such a rainfall as fell this week to be definitely bad ground, on which homes should not be built. Onfe extensive such area, as yet hardly built upon, was given particular attention this morning; a whole hillside slope is cut and broken by greasy minor slips, with larger slides here and there.