North's Roads Are Wrecked Beyond Counties' Resources

Northern Advocate, 26 June 1946, Page 7

North's Roads Are Wrecked Beyond Counties' Resources

(By a Special Correspondent! (Special) KAIKOHE, This Day. Today the Middle and Far North were old and in parlous condition even

roads are a battered wreck. Without

before the rains came

floods, the county councils were finding it next Vj impossible to maintain their surfaces; with floods, the task is utterly beyond them. Cost of the damage in t.he three counties of Bay of Islands. Whangaroa and Mangonui, it has been said, will run possibly into £50,000. if the soft-ening-up of the roads that will develop later is taken into account. The counties simply cannot raise the money. It will have to be done by Government grant or the roads will be impassable again and ixgain in the winter. Machinery to handle jobs of the magnitude now facing the local bodies is just not in Northland. Manpower and housing for that manpower are merely two more headaches. ASSESSING THE DAMAGE Engineers and their maintenance staffs, where the latter can be spared from the task of making temporary one-way passages through the multitude of slips, are busy trying to assess the damage for their anxious councils. That damage seems to have been restricted in the main to road surfaces. Few bridges suffered harm, although hundreds of bridges in the area | I j i j j j

Bridge approaches, however, are a sorry spectacle in many places. Years cl metalling have gone for nothing where unnumbered scours have swept the roads down to the bare earth.

Slips have laid a coating of mud over metalled surfaces and have frequently loosened the batters in preparation for inevitable new slips in the first wet weather of the future.

And everywhere, there is evidence of apparently sound patches of good straight road breaking up, the mud working through in a matter of hours once it is started by trucks and heavy service buses. The present damage is unquestionably the greater because of the pre-

partition effected by the 10-day downpour late in April. There must logically be more such rains before the winter ends and the same conditions will then apply even more severely. ROADING SYSTEM SMASHED It is hardly too much to say that the present reading system of the North has been smashed. Patching and filling will, if the weather breaks long

enough to permit it. restore them only on the most temporary basis. It is time that a fresh viewpoint was adopted by the authorities in Wellington, even by those in charge locally. Not only must permanent surfaces be provided but watertables must be regarded as an item of major importance. If the roads are allowed to continue with their present foundations, maintenance methods and watertabling. it is going to cost £50.000 every winter. That cost would not take many years to equal the initial outlay and small maintenance of tar-sealed or even concrete roads. If it were capitalised, as it would be if the roads were company-owned, present methods must prove to be bad business, apart from the terrific extra cost, now being imposed on vehicles using those roads—a cost that obviously comes back in increased commodity prices and poorer returns for primary producers. The nation is the loser when roads are permitted to remain in the condition now obtaining in the North. STATE MUST DO THE JOB Somehow. Wellington failed to appreciate the significance of the summer drought insofar as Northland was concerned. Aid was granted—in the form of record-priced, lowest-quality South Island hay and also by way of loans—loans to encumber the farmer still further in debt because he was the victim of an occurrence beyond human control. The question must now be asked whether Wellington can grasp the tremendous upheaval in transportation conditions in this province. If it does, it will declare a state of emergency for the Public Works Department and ship every available bulldozer and earth-shifter, tar-sprayer or concrete-mixer, man and hutment, into the North ‘‘for the duration” —and will build roads on a scale that will make the job a permanent one. Only the state is qualified to handle a task of this size. It is clear that if the county councils are asked to do it, farmer and townsman alike will be literally in the mud for a long time to come.