Questions flow after weather bomb landslip
Skyline Enterprises boss Geoff McDonald has defended the logging work done on Bob's Peak saying it was a "well managed, well audited and inspected operation".
On Thursday night, as a month's worth of rain fell on Queenstown in a 24-hour period, water streamed down the hill beneath the iconic tourist attraction, collecting logs, debris and mud, in the section where CLE Contracting has cut a path for the new gondola and also a firebreak.
The torrent surged through Queenstown Cemetery at the bottom of the hill, covering about a third of the site and knocking over headstones, and then out onto Brecon St, following the roads down into town.
Police and emergency management response teams rushed to evacuate people from nearby hotels and homes. Residents in communities off Gorge Road were also evacuated as a separate landslip came down off the hills, in a known at-risk area, while roads across the district were blocked. That all led Queenstown's mayor Glyn Lewers to declare a local state of emergency, a rare event, which was lifted on Sunday.
The incident has led many people in the town to question the wisdom of removing the trees on the steep hill above town.
McDonald says the two-year operation was designed to increase the safety zone around the gondola line in the leased area, and extended to create a much bigger firebreak.
"It's been slow, because the terrain is so difficult and dangerous," he says. "The contractor has had to work around the seasons and the weather, etc., and just ensure it was safe.
"It's been a very well managed and well audited and inspected operation, he isn't able to do anything without the appropriate kind of authority. He's checking his methodology and ensuring things were done safely.
"Unfortunately then, we've had this once in 24-year weather event."
McDonald says while much of the talk has been about the flood picking up 'forestry slash', akin to incidents in Hawke's Bay and Gisborne, some of the Queenstown logs were stacked in a bund, or log wall.
"There's a little bit of forestry debris and whatever down the bottom, but some of those logs in the cemetery have come from a log stack up on the road. You can see it up on the hill. The slip has picked that up, so it wasn't like a whole lot of material left lying around."
Logs, big boulders and other materials are extracted from the site in a sled "in a progressive way", after being stacked and stored in different locations on the hill.
Still, McDonald says: "I can completely understand people saying 'oh well, if they weren't clearing the space'. But the clearance was being made to improve safety, and then, ironically, you have an issue with this weather event."
While Skyline is confident in the approach taken by the contractor, with advice from third-party forestry advisors, it now needs to take a fresh look at the slope.
"It's a different site now and we've got this slip face to sort out. We're talking to council about that. And then we're going to look at the rest of it and say 'well, how can we get some of that material off there more quickly'."
Skyline will offer to assist in the clearance of the Queenstown Cemetery site.
The cemetery has both historical and modern graves. The entire area was previously mapped in GIS, so the council has accurate records of burial sites.
Former mayoral candidate Jon Mitchell, who has a decades-long career in emergency management, would like to a map provided showing the graves affected for relatives. His parents are buried in the cemetery, and he walked up to the site over the weekend, but fortunately their grave was intact. [Update:QLDC has now provided a map, see below]
On the incident as whole, Mitchell says his bigger concern is "the whole lack of appreciation of the consequences of decisions that council makes", especially when it consents works.
"It was quite apparent to everyone there was a potential problem there," he says.
"Creating log bunds on a steep slope like that ... it would be interesting to have an objective view on that. The ideal situation would have been to remove all the debris as they were going along.
"These significant weather events do happen, and we know from elsewhere in the logging industry, that some practices are not fit for purpose.
"This slope is above day-care facilities, a school, businesses, so we need a much more risk-aware approach from council in all its decision making."
