Welcome
to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 5
Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds
NIWA’s long term
forecast for summer reassured us all that the weather would settle mid-January
into our usual run of 6 weeks or so of balmy sunshine; it hasn’t happened. Summer
continues turbulent and changeable and this is beginning to look like trouble
for the expressway as diggers start chipping into the swampy peat at the Poplar
Rd junction. Here the new road heading north, veers away from the old, straight
through the heart of the Wharemauku Swamp. This map (pictured) is from Carkeek’s –The Kapiti Coast
(1966), and will orientate you. The junction is in the centre.
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| Peat excavation at Poplar Avenue -Feb 12 2014 |
Then, as you can see
from these recent site photographs, water is already beginning to reclaim the
site, while the peat being dug out is mucky black and sodden. They have been
working in this small area for around 3 months, but they haven’t found a bottom
to it yet.
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| Swamp water at the Poplar Avenue excavation -Feb 12 2014 |
When we first settled
in Kapiti we were warned to check that the piles of any house we considered
buying went down through the peat, into the ground below. There were stories of
houses, floating on the top of this land, that wouldn’t stay level. This effect
varies summer to winter as the water content of the peat rises and falls. The
area may look like solid ground, but down below it still thinks and acts
like a swamp. It is a thousand
years old and deep -23 feet where the NZTA has drilled at the dune lake, though
we’ve heard estimates that range as high as 40. And this is the kind of
variation you would expect in what at base is a coastal dune area, that has a long history of sea coast movement.
All this leads to
peculiar flows of water, which is constantly seeping towards the coast from the
hills, below the ground. You can see this whenever it rains because the water
in the drains immediately turns swamp-water black. Substantial spring-fed creeks
can suddenly disappear underground into nowhere. The dune lake has a smaller sister,
just across the Wharemauku, which to our great surprise never dries up. Kapiti
has long pleasant seaside summers
(usually), which is why so many are moving out here from the City, yet even at
the height of last year’s drought, this wetland still retained water. Like the
Wharemauku, it is spring fed and
yet the expressway has been designed to run right over the top of it.
Does the NZTA know?
An interesting sidelight
to all this is to compare the way in which engineers work now, as compared to 100
years ago. The original highway was along the beach, but the railway and road
were designed to hug the base of the hills for as long as that was possible. Those
engineers could see the trouble they were heading into, and this looks like a
sensibly managed, low risk, cost effective response to it. They were employees
of the Public Works Department, so have today’s engineers, now effectively
independent operators (even where employed by the State), abandoned the solid,
butter box pragmatism, that played such a large part in forming the character
of early NZ Pakeha history?
Email contact -vantoohey@gmail.com Jill Studd's blog
