An army of shovellers

Press, 5 July 1977, Page 1

An army of shovellers

An army of 130 men leapt to their shovels within 20 minutes of Lyttelton’s emergency force being activated at 9 a.m. yesterday. Ahead of them lay a big clean-up job — hardly a road in the borough had escaped the slips, and about a dozen houses had suffered some damage. Five houses were evacuated during the night. The emergency force developed as a sort of vigilante group after the storm of August, 1975, because of the apparent inability of the civil defence organisation to provide immediate relief.

The civil defence area controller for Lyttelton Harbour (Mr J. B. Graham) alerted civil defence groups at Diamond Harbour and Governor’s Bay. But he said he had no authority to take similar action in Lyttelton itself. That was the responsibility of Lyttelton’s Mayor (Mr J. B. Collett).

Several houses were hit badly by slips. At 2.30 a.m., a wall of mud buried the back wall of a St David Street house almost to the eaves, while a subsidence at the front left foundations suspended in mid-air. The family was evacuated.

At Corsair Bay a torrent of mud and debris slammed into the back of the home

of Mr B. Mac Kay, knocking his newly-built home about 2cm forward on its foundations. Slips blocked the roads to Sumner and Governor’s Bay, and council workers were kept busy clearing Cressy Terrace and Park Terrace.

A mud slide hit the back of a cottage at 12 Hawkhurst Road, demolishing a lean-to at the rear. The cottage was later evacuated.

Further up the hill the Brandons, who had been at the centre of a heated wrangle with the Lyttelton Borough Council for the past 12 months over the question of responsibility for stabilising the hillside, left their home on Sunday night as slips threatened it once again. However the Schenkel family, also involved in the controversy, said temporary trenches dug earlier this year appeared to have stabilised the hill behind their home.

A Cunningham Terrace house was also hit after a section of the road above collapsed. Sections on a subdivision in Cass Bay have suffered Fill forming the bottom of the sections broke away, and slid to the beach 25m below during the torrential rain.