Sandwiched between two rivers and the sea, the town of Westport is a microcosm of the thorny questions about resilience, funding and managed retreat which will become ever more common in a warming world
On February 1, 2018, Ruth Vaega walked into the kitchen of her home on Snodgrass Road in Westport to find her granddaughter had spilled something.
At least, that's what she thought at first, as she watched her play in a puddle of water on the kitchen floor.
"I said, 'What have you done?' Because I'd had no idea there was water coming up through the floorboards," she recalls. Then Vaega looked out the window to see her husband, her daughter and a neighbour from down the road trying to move things from her shed to dry ground.
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By the time Vaega made it out the front door, with her granddaughter on her shoulder, the water was approaching waist height. She couldn't feel the concrete path that led to the front gate with her feet and the water was muddy and too dark to see through. She worried she was going to fall down with her granddaughter, but she made it to the highest part of the road where her husband had relocated a 10-foot camper.
They stayed there for six hours.
When the floodwaters receded, Vaega returned to find much of her home destroyed. She used the insurance payout to lift the house onto stilts, though the shed which was on a concrete foundation couldn't be raised. It still floods from time to time.
Vaega's story is not unique. Westport has undergone a series of devastating floods in recent years. In addition to the 2018 ex-cyclone Fehi, there were the July 2021 atmospheric river and the February 2022 downpour.
In May, the Government announced a $22.9 million funding package for flood resilience, including a ring wall protecting much of the main town. But some places, such as the Snodgrass neighbourhood where Vaega lives, are still points of contention. The local council, regional council and central government still haven't come to agreement on the way forward, whether it's additional, bespoke flood protections for the highest-risk homes or red stickering and buyouts.
The importance of these issues extends beyond Westport. As climate change worsens – and it will keep doing so until the world stops burning fossil fuels – more and more communities in New Zealand will face these impacts. The thorny questions about resilience, funding, managed retreat and more that have been asked in Westport will be asked by many other places in the coming years.
There are lessons to learn, then, from how this has played out on the frontline of the climate crisis, in a town of fewer than 5000 people sandwiched between two rivers and the ocean.
Lack of action
Frank Dooley was a chartered account for many years. For most of them, he lived in Westport. He retired in 2021, selling his business to an employee. That was meant to be the start of retirement.
Instead, in the lead-up to last year's local government elections, he felt moved to run for a seat on the West Coast Regional Council.
"I was pretty disappointed at the lack of action regarding flood protection for the community of Westport," he says. His house sits on the edge of the Orowaiti River. Walk into the backyard and you can see the Snodgrass across the river.
Dooley's house didn't flood in any of the big storms. The water did rise more than a metre to swamp his yard. It crept up over the low deck and inched its way towards his back door. But it never made it in the house.
"I got lucky," he says. Others weren't so fortunate – and it was all avoidable, if action had been taken sooner, he believes.
"What I was seeing was nothing was happening. As a community, we needed action. And you can say, 'Well what action has happened in the last twelve months, Frank?' And I'd say to you, nothing."
In June last year, the Buller District Council and the West Coast Regional Council submitted a proposal to the Government on how to protect Westport. First, Cabinet took nearly a year to make a decision. Then, the Department of Internal Affairs commissioned an engineering review of the proposal by Tonkin and Taylor, which raised a number of issues.
That led to four months of extra delays, but Dooley believes progress is finally about to start. A handful of "quick win" projects will begin construction shortly, including some flood walls and works to stop local creeks from spilling over throughout the city during major inundation events.
Jamie Cleine, the Buller mayor, is a bit more optimistic about the state of the resilience work.
A significant amount of work has been done on understanding the local hazards. These aren't just coastal flooding, but also river flooding, major rainfall events creating surface flooding because of high water tables and some liquefaction risks in the event of a big quake.
The council is also forging ahead with a "master planning exercise", which Cleine worries has been the subject of some misunderstandings.
"A lot of people think that that means that we're picking up town tomorrow and moving it, and that's never been on anyone's radar," he says.
"At the moment, there is no master planned spatial plan for where a future Westport would grow or should grow or any levers indicating where we should or shouldn't build cognisant of the risks that we now know about it."
The plan focuses on high ground about a kilometre away from the main street. That's where the temporary accomodation village was constructed after the July 2021 floods, but the council had the foresight to install infrastructure capable of servicing 700 houses.
The next step is implementing that plan.
"The risk here is that, right now, we could get another event any day. And we're suddenly looking for a few hundred sections and without that planning and at least some starter infrastructure going in, we're not able to respond."
Funding
There are two barriers to implementation: funding and social licence.
Though the Government's $22.9 million package funds flood protections, including the ring wall around most of the town, there are many more things that need to be done that remain unfunded.
Three quarters of the town's stormwater network is co-mingled wastewater and stormwater. With naturally elevated groundwater levels which rise further during flood events, the full network needs to be rebuilt.
"That's like tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. The current funding model would say these 4000 people would pay for that," Cleine says. While three waters reforms could help with that, there are other thorny issues which have no obvious funding sources.
Managed retreat is a big one. The council doesn't have the cash to pay out every high-risk homeowner. The approach taken in Hawkes Bay and the Tairāwhiti after Cyclone Gabrielle, of a 50/50 split between central and local government, is unaffordable for the poorest regional council in the country.
Leaving it up to individuals won't work either.
"That's the bit that we probably need some help with because there's huge risk that we just get slumification," Cleine says. "You could argue now, the smart money are already building [on the high ground]. They're not building cheap houses down the road, they're building where all our $700,000, $800,000, million dollar houses are.
"As that increases, the cheaper houses that are exposed to a risk are bought up by first home buyers or people who are of less means and that just doubles down on the vulnerability of the people's ability to recover and respond to events."
Dooley agrees that the West Coast needs special attention, because it doesn't have the funding and financing capabilities of other councils.
"Central government do need to recognise that, from the point of view of the West Coast, something like 84 percent of our land is in Crown ownership. And that's not rateable. We have a massive area of land which we get no income from, but we have an obligation to protect that land and protect the assets that are on that land," he says.
He points to catchment boards, which get 75 percent of their funding from central government, as a model which offers certainty and predictability.
"The funding model that you put in place just has to be intergenerational. We've got to rely on intergenerational equity to actually fund what's in front of us. If we don't do that, it becomes totally unaffordable for the current generation."
Communications
Social licence is the second obstacle to progress in Westport, where both Cleine and Dooley admit communication has been poor because they haven't had any certainty about what the final plan for adaptation and managed retreat will look like.
"From the point of view of our residents, it's a total lack of communication," Dooley says. "That's the improvement that we have to make. As we go into developing our protection project, stepping up our communications is absolutely essential."
Landowners on the outskirts of town will need to be negotiated with, because the plans involve some of the flood protections being built on private land.
"The big challenge to the alignment is the south end of town and where that's going to finish and how that's going to cut across and come into the Orowaiti. That's a discussion that we're going to have to have with landowners."
Cleine says there's been an "information void" for the town.
"The community engagement part is a whole body of work that needs still to happen. That is absolutely critical to all of this working," he says.
That's particularly the case for people in communities like Snodgrass which won't get protected by the ring wall. There's no funding earmarked for them in the $22.9m package, but the mayor says some money available for bespoke house protections could go to them.
"We're just a wee bit early in the process to finalise what that would look like, but absolutely I want to be able to go to the likes of Snodgrass and say, actually, here's an opportunity to offer you a way to protect some equity that you've currently got in your properties."
There's also work to be done on deciding which areas hit hard in previous floods might be red-stickered.
That certainty would be a welcome relief for the Snodgrass. Vaega remembers a recent conversation with a neighbour who can't lift their house because it has a concrete foundation.
"They just said, 'We're stuck. We're waiting for designation. What are we? Are we red-stickered? Are we yellow? Can we build on the land? Can we take our houses and put them somewhere else?' We just don't know where we are and it's quite distressing, actually."
Overall, the local community is relatively split on the flood resilience issue, Cleine says. It can be heated and it's certainly controversial.
"I think the easiest thing in the world for a mayor to keep getting reelected would be to not tackle any of this stuff and focus on the here and now," he says.
What are the lessons from Westport? The communications are an obvious one. But everyone is clear that the Government needs to sort out its plans for funding, financing and implementing adaption. As long as it keeps dealing with crisis-struck regions on a case-by-case basis, there's no certainty. There's definitely no way for places to get ahead of the extreme weather.
"I think our direction, where we're heading, feels like a sustainable way that the country might be able to approach it over time," Cleine says.
Dooley is less confident.
"We need better planning and better design and zoning rules. And then we need to have a mechanism which provides much quicker decision-making," he says.
"There is too much bureaucracy to actually get action with the speed that we need. We're sitting here, mate, two years after the flood. Two years. And we haven't had the action that we need."
Whichever parties form the next government will have to implement a lasting but flexible adaptation framework, so communities know where they stand and what their options are. That will need to include funding mechanisms, particularly for small councils which don't have the ability to just buy out flood-stricken homes.
In the meantime, Vaega will keep looking out of her kitchen window onto the Orowaiti River and worrying when it rains.
"I've got so many bad memories," she says. "I don't want to be here. We look at the river every day. We've got a [water level] marker out there and we just hope that it won't go any higher."
