Source: Radio New Zealand
Repaired Lake Ferry Road at Turanganui River bridge. Supplied
The South Wairarapa District Council is delivering supplies by helicopter to more than 200 people still cut off on the southern coastline.
The bridge to Lake Ferry was reopened Wednesday evening, freeing roughly 70 people who had been cut off by storms.
Wairarapa emergency management controller Simon Taylor estimated another 200 people were still cut off in Ngawi, and another 30 were stuck in Whāngaimoana.
“We’re actually using helicopters to get the food in, and some of it is just estimates because we’re talking to people within these areas but there are a couple of areas, like Whāngaimoana, that I believe don’t have mobile coverage at the moment,” he told RNZ shortly after helicopters had left to deliver food on Wednesday evening.
“We’re just trying to get in there and start the process of understanding their welfare needs, but we are bringing food with us.”
Once council staff got into the cut off areas, he expected the number of damaged properties to spike.
“While the number seems small at the moment, we’re talking less than a dozen [damaged homes], we still haven’t had access to a number of our communities and that’s where we believe the number is going to increase,” he said.
“We’re still concerned there’s a number of homes that are damaged but we just can’t get to them.”
Taylor said an engineer had visited the bridge to Ngawi and the council was waiting on a report.
“We had an engineer in [Wednesday morning] looking at the bridge leading in Ngawi … We are still waiting just to confirm the structural integrity of the bridge before we can make a decision on whether it reopens or not,” he said.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
