A Tale Of Two Stopbanks Hemming In Wairau River

Tuesday, 8 July 2025, 4:42 pm
Article: Kira Carrington - Local Democracy Reporter

When Marlborough District Council’s chief executive was confronted by a frustrated Spring Creek resident last weekend, the collective anxieties of a whole community was laid at his door.

At the time John Boswell took it in stride.

“Look, his house is threatened,” Boswell told Local Democracy Reporting after the resident left.

“You can understand the person, like, I get it.”

The resident was not alone in his dissatisfaction with council. Nearly every Spring Creek resident who spoke to LDR voiced the same grievance.

“They should have sorted it out yesterday,” one resident said, standing next to a water pump.

“We expected council would start the works when they said they would,” said another.

Each frustrated sentiment was underpinned by a single question.

Where were the promised Wairau River stopbank repairs? And why had they been delayed?

In 2024, council set aside $8.7 million in their Long Term Plan to strengthen the stopbank after it was compromised following the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake. That included $3.6m in government funding.

Work was to begin at the end of 2024, but was delayed by about a year to the start of 2026, with work to be completed by June 2027.

That delay left residents, who had already been flooded for three of the past four years, with another year at risk of flooding.

Speaking last week, Boswell said rebuilding a stopbank from scratch was no easy task, and required time to get it right.

“You can't just repair a stopbank overnight,” he said.

“It takes time, and because of the type of events that we experienced at the weekend, they're going to have to do it in the summer.”

Boswell said the delay was caused by a combination of design finalising, funding and material sourcing, and works on the northern side of the Wairau River.

“There was work done on the northern side in terms of clearing out some vegetation, and widening the river [to take] the pressure off the southern bank, which worked really well during [last weekend’s] event.

“And then we went through the design process, sourcing the funding, getting the materials, and so on.

“They're working bloody hard to do it as quickly as they can.”

At least 35,000 tonnes of rock would be needed for the job, the council said last year. Most of that was expected to come from the nearby Pukaka Quarry.

Boswell said council had long communicated with the Spring Creek community about the complexities of rebuilding a stopbank.

“One of the first things I walked in on when I came to this job was a meeting in the hall at Spring Creek, where our rivers engineers team talked the community through the issue, what the potential fix looked like, and the time frame for that fix,” Boswell said.

“Since that meeting, they've worked bloody hard to get the design confirmed, to source the money from government, to think about where they're going to source the materials and how they're going to pre-position them.”

Concerns about how the stopbank would perform when put under stress caused council to issue a precautionary 24-hour evacuation for 60 households in Spring Creek on June 27.

But Boswell said that stopbank actually performed better than they thought during the rainfall.

“The bank itself held up really, really well ... it was performing exactly as we hoped it would,” Boswell said.

“Once the river level started to drop, and we could see that the integrity of it still was there, then we were able to let the residents back in.”

Boswell said he stood by the decision to evacuate residents.

“When it comes to risking someone's life versus their property, then we'll always err on the side of caution, and that's what we did on this particular occasion,” he said.

Boswell said the water that covered parts of the township was surface flooding, not due to a stopbank breach.

“The surface flooding was as a result of stormwater coming in across the paddock to the west of the Spring Creek settlement,” he said.

“On this particular occasion it resulted in a low, although incredibly annoying, level of stormwater or flooding for the local residents.

“But it certainly wasn't life threatening to the same extent as if there had been a [stop bank] breach.”

Boswell said the council was also hard at work identifying and repairing faults in the stopbank at the confluence of the Wairau and Waihopai rivers.

The council issued a “be ready to leave” order on June 27 that led many Renwick residents to self-evacuate.

Boswell said it was a very close call for Renwick residents.

“During [a routine] check, it was found what appeared to be seepage through a stopbank on the Waihopai River, which if compromised could have impacted on lower Renwick,” Boswell said.

Boswell said that if the bank had been breached they would have had less than an hour to fully evacuate lower Renwick.

“We thought that was enough time if people have been pre-warned, to get them out if we needed to.

“We had a trigger point for when we were going to order an evacuation.

“We didn't quite get there, so we didn't have to do it.”

Council staff would be out in Renwick identifying any more weaknesses in that stopbank.

“We're going to do whatever we can to ensure the integrity of that stopbank, should there be another event,” Boswell said.

“Then we're going to look at the wider scheme just to make sure that we've got everything.”

LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.

© Scoop Media

Local Democracy Reporting

Content from the Local Democracy Reporting (LDR) service is published by Scoop as a registered New Zealand Media Outlet LDR Partner.