Drainage and Flood Control

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24800, 14 February 1946, Page 4

Drainage and Flood Control

The Waimakariri River Trust, which in a month or so will transfer its responsibilities to the North Canterbury Catchment Board, yesterday received from its engineer, Mr H. W. Harris, a report on measures to control drainage and flooding in the 93,000 acre area between the Ashley and the Waimakariri, from Oxford to the coast; and in passing this report to the board, to be discussed with the five county and borough authorities of the area, the trust has in a sense brought its long and important history to a close, and upon one of its most significant acts. The Waimakariri River Trust has always been obliged to do its work under severe handicaps, which derived, it is true, from an originally defective conception of the task it had to do and of the proper means to do it. It was, for example, a river authority, but not a drainage authority, which meant that the trust could carry out well-designed works in or along the river—and then be frustrated by the failure of neighbouring authorities to carry out or maintain the complementary drainage works. This defect is pointed out in the report, in fact; and it is one of several which the Catchment Board is much better placed chan, the trust to overcome. In the scheme proposed by Mr Harris the board will approach a major work, as the estimate of cost shows, as the map shows better, and as the record of the area in recent years shows best of all. It is a record of increasing flood risk, deterioration of some land by waterlogging, and heavy losses on lands drowned out when in seed or in crop. This is not to say that the proposals should be or can be accepted at sight. They will be, and ought to be, closely examined locally; they will certainly be examined as keenly by the engineers of the Soil Conservation and Rivers Control Council. But so much is clear: first, that the time is full ripe for comprehensively planned control action; second, that the capital values involved—more than £ 2,500,000 —should contribute by rate a fair proportion; third, that the scope and object of the work justify, as Mr Aschman, the trust’s chairman, said, “a very generous " subsidy ” from the central body.