DAMAGE BY FLOOD

Taranaki Daily News, 11 April 1935, Page 7

DAMAGE BY FLOOD

FARMER’S GRAPHIC STORY.

APPEAL TO WAITARA COUNCIL.

The great damage caused: to some farm properties as the result of flooding was emphasised in a graphic letter from a farmer on Karaka Flat, Waitara, received by the Waitara Borough Council last night. The farmer asked for a remission of water rate as he had been faced with heavy losses when the Waitara River flooded four-fifths of his farm. “Seventy acres of my 87-acre farm was a raging torrent,” wrote the farmer, all my fences, subdivisions and road boundaries are gone, and it will cost £lOO to replace my haystack. My ensilage stack, the product of 10 acres, was ruined, a field of mangolds silted over with sand and all my maize for autumn feed flattened with Sand, stone and large logs. A 14-acre section adjacent to the river had fully four acres washed out to sea and the balance, covered with sand and stone, is ruined for all time.

“It will cost a good sum to regrass a lot of my land that is covered too deeply with silt and sand. I had to sell some of my dairy herd, as I could not feed them, at 16s a head. Seven others of my herd have slipped owing to damage received through swimming over barbed wire fences and the general knocking about all through the night, which will -seriously interfere with returns next season.”

The council had the power to remit rates, said the Mayor, but he did not know about water charges. Many people in Waitara. had suffered loss -through flood, said Cr. W. B. Glasgow, and they might be in a position to apply for remission. One mechanic had had his tools, his means of livelihood, washed into the river, and many houses near the river bank had had water three feet high inside. The farmer had suffered damage far more considerable than that pointed out, said Cr. T. Wilson. He did not wish to minimise the hardship, said the Mayor, but it was a dangerous precedent for the council to adopt. It was decided that, while the council was sympathetic, it had no power, to remit water charges.