Flood victims get help from North

Press, 23 October 1978, Page 1

Flood victims get help from North

Appeals for aid for the victims of disasters invariably and understandably raise questions of how the aid will be distributed. Otago and Southland local bodies, faced with mopping up after the recent disastrous floods can however, draw on the experience of others. That experience was gained in the Wellington floods of 1976 — floods which resulted in the local bodies in the Hutt Valley area becoming experts on the distribution of flood relief. The Mayor of Lower Hutt (Mr J. KennedyGood) was very much to the fore in relief work at that time, for it was his local body’s area that was the hardest hit. Mr Kennedy-Good and his council have also been to the fore in collecting money for the victims of the' O t a g o-Southland floods. Within a day of the full

scope of the disaster’s becoming known, the council was collecting money, and Lower Hutt service clubs and schools had agreed to help with a street appeal. The council itself gave $lOOO from the mayoral relief fund. Not only did the Lower Hutt council give money, it offered to send its civil defence officer to the South to give what on-the-spot advice and practical help he could. “We have been through it, and we know what it is all about,” Mr KennedyGood said. “And it’s a big, big job.” Mr Kennedy-Good also told the mayors of Invercargill and Gore of his council’s experience in setting up relief funds and an administrative group to deal with them during the 1976 Hutt Valley floods. “This administration of the monev is a big task.” he told “The. Press.”

“In their case, they may

be dealing with up to SIM.” In 1976, appeals throughout New Zealand produced $279,000 for the Hutt Valley flood victims, and this was matched — up to $250,000 —- by a dollar-for-dollar Government subsidy. This left Hutt Valley and Wellington bodies with more than $500,000 to distribute, 47 per cent of this going to the Lower Hutt area alone. It took almost a year to allocate. From this experience Mr Kennedy-Good suggested that the OtagoSouthland bodies form a central relief committee comprising the mayors of the flooded towns, the chairmen of the affected counties, representatives of the Earthquake and War Damage Fund, a representative of private insurance interests, and a representative of service groups.

“That is the way we

worked, and we brought in our associated officers, of course,” Mr KennedyGood said. “Obviously they are going to have a mammoth task,” he said. “Although we are a tight geographical area, we found it difficult enough in 1976, particularly in determining the guidelines for the distribution of the public money. “There were some cases where we made immediate cash grants of up to about $2OO. “This was to meet emergency situations,” Mr Kennedy-Good said. “After that you have to go through the whole procedure of determining what is the uninsurable loss, having it inspected by engineers, getting costings on the restoration, finding out what comes within the orbit of the private insurance companies, what under Earthquake and War Damage,

and what is uninsurable,” he said. “All these things have to be sorted out, and it takes a lot of technical back-up to be able to do this. “You have got to involve the engineers of the local authority, the town clerks, the administrative staff. “You can see it is a pretty big job — and a major responsibility to disperse public money,” Mr Kennedy-Good said. “It is a very heavy responsibility to ensure the correct distribution; to ensure that those people who really need the money are the people who get it.” Mr Kennedy-Good said that “uninsurable” damage was the damage to sections* by land-siips, and to such things as fences, paths, clothes-lines, and damage that required the erection of crib walls to repair. But people who were not insured were not

“wiped,” he said. “They got Consideration, too. You might say that they were not prudent, some might say they deserved to lose everything. “But you have to have regard to young people who are on two mortgages, even three. Perhaps, too, they might be heavily under-insured. “We made grants to quite a number of such people, because the criterion is not whether that person was as prudent as you or I would be. “It is not a simple matter,” he said. “We want to give all the help we can, because we know the traumatic experience we had here,” Mr Kennedy-Good said. “I can just imagine what it is like down there ... it will be colossal. That is what I want to bring home to our people,” Mr Kennedy-Good said. “We have a special obligation in Lower Hutt, I believe.”