Source: Radio New Zealand
A flooded cycleway at Petone. Phil Pennington / RNZ
Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop says Wellington Water needs to “sort it out” and fix a flooded cycleway.
The rail underpass tunnel on the $70 million cycleway at Petone was still thigh-deep in water on Friday morning, days on from Monday’s storm.
New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) has passed responsibility to Hutt City Council, which passed it to Wellington Water.
Bishop, who is also the local MP for Hutt South and transport minister, said it flooded because a pump station lost power during the weather bomb.
“It’s clear that Wellington Water are responsible for the pumps, sumps and drains,” he told RNZ on Friday. “Wellingtonians know all too well about the problems with that organisation. As infrastructure minister, I urge them to sort it out.”
Commuting cyclists were now choosing to avoid the tunnel and take their bikes instead through the railway station’s pedestrian underpass tunnel, which remains dry. While it was at the same depth as the cycleway tunnel, it was 200m to the north, further away from Korokoro Stream.
Wellington Water was grappling with its biggest ever disaster at the Moa Point treatment station, which had been spewing raw sewage onto the capital’s south coast.
The agency did not mention a pump when asked earlier about the underpass.
RNZ has asked Wellington Water about the pump.
It said instead on Wednesday the underpass was a “multi-agency dependency”.
“New Zealand Transport Agency is obviously responsible for the state highway. Wellington Water manages the stormwater culvert and Greater Wellington Regional Council [manages] the waterway – in this case, the Korokoro Stream.”
This was under a decades-old water courses agreement.
NZTA designed and built the cycleway that blew its budget by almost three times, working out at $25m per kilometre – about the same as some state highways cost – partly because it did not anticipate so much contamination of the strip under the path or how it had a lot of cables and pipes already running under it.
The agency was now a lead partner in the much more expensive harbour cycleway that will connect to the Petone one, and in the two huge state highway projects nearby, Riverlink and Petone-to-Grenada.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
