Latest news with #PeterdeGraaf
RNZ News
3 days ago
- General
- RNZ News
Water finally restored in Dargaville
Many homes and businesses in the Northland town of Dargaville went without running water during King's Birthday weekend. Photo: RNZ / Peter de Graaf Water has finally been fully restored in Dargaville after a massive outage caused by four separate pipeline ruptures last week. Friday's breakages in the 40-kilometre water supply pipeline all but emptied the town's water reservoir and left most homes without running water or under tight restrictions. Kaipara District Council said water was restored to the last homes on upper Hokianga Road, late on Sunday afternoon. However, a resident living just off Hokianga Road told RNZ her taps only started flowing again on Monday night, an outage of almost four days. The council had to scramble to set up water tankers and portaloos around town during the King's Birthday long weekend, while contractors brought in extra staff from Whangārei and Auckland to fix the pipe. In an update posted late on Sunday, the council said tap water in some parts of town was still discoloured, but it had been treated and was safe to drink. The discolouration was caused by sediment being stirred up as the tanks were refilled. A council spokesperson urged Dargaville residents to continue using water conservatively while levels recovered. As of Sunday evening, the reservoir was about 25 percent full. The delay in reinstating water to the upper Hokianga Road area - including Panorama Place, Cobham Avenue and Mountview Place - was due to problems with the booster pumps, the council said.
RNZ News
14-05-2025
- Climate
- RNZ News
Paihia's main road to be closed to fix storm damage
Huge swells triggered by ex-Cyclone Tam washed away part of the waterfront in Paihia, exposing cables and a water main. Photo: Supplied / Grant McCallum Paihia's main road will close for storm repairs for the next three weeks, as the after-effects of Cyclone Tam continue to plague the Bay of Islands. At its peak on 17 April the ex-tropical cyclone knocked out power to tens of thousands of homes across Northland, as well as flooding roads and eroding shorelines in places like Paihia and Russell. In Paihia, the storm took a large chunk out of Marsden Road/State Highway 11 near the town centre. After several days the road was partly reopened, but NZTA Waka Kotahi said it would now have to close for repairs in both directions until 6 June. Workers inspect damage to SH11/Marsden Road in Paihia during Cyclone Tam. Photo: RNZ / Peter de Graaf The closure - between Bayview Road and Williams Road - would apply between 7am and 6pm, Monday to Friday. Traffic would be diverted through the town centre. At night and during the weekends, the southbound lane, towards Ōpua, would be open through the worksite with a reduced speed limit of 30km/h. NZTA said the footpath, a section of which disappeared into the tide, would also be repaired. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
Otago Daily Times
07-05-2025
- Otago Daily Times
Home destroyed by speeding driver crashing through roof
The home of a Whangārei man in his 80s was destroyed when an allegedly stolen car landed on its roof. Photo: RNZ By Peter de Graaf and Susan Edmunds of RNZ The home of a Whangārei man in his 80s has been destroyed after a car travelling at high speed flew off the road, sailed over a neighbour's unit and crashed through his roof. The man's distraught partner said he was in hospital at the time and only found out on Wednesday morning. The car smashed through a barrier on Mill Rd and landed in the man's living room on Miller's Lane just after 11pm on Tuesday, destroying the unit. Police said it was incredibly fortunate no one was killed. Senior Sergeant Rene Rakete said officers were called to the corner of Mill Rd and Millers Lane about 11pm, after the car hit a fence at high speed then landed on a roof. Police would likely be dealing with a death if the owner had been home at the time, he said. The car eventually came to a stop in front of the unit, with both the property and the vehicle significantly damaged, Rakete said. The driver fled and a police dog was unable to track anyone from the car. The man's partner said police told her the car was stolen and the driver fled on foot. Photo: RNZ Police were, however, "following lines of enquiry". The man's partner said police told her the car was stolen and the driver fled on foot. The officer estimated the car was travelling at 180kmh when it left the road, she said. "It's obviously uninhabitable... This is his home, it's heartbreaking." She said he had lived in the brick-and-tile unit, in the suburb of Kensington, for the past nine years. She told RNZ she was waiting for an insurance assessor to come up from Auckland, and she was trying to find a builder to make what was left of his unit safe. Reportedly, the only damage to the first unit was a fence paling through the garage roof.
RNZ News
05-05-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
Collaboration key to showcasing North Island tourism destinations
Overseas tourists only account for 20-30 percent of visitors to Northland. Photo: RNZ / Peter de Graaf North Island regions hope a new collaboration will encourage more tourists to explore, stay longer and spend more. Three airports and 15 North Island regional tourism organisations have banded together to share resources as part of a new Memorandum of Understanding. The partnership was officially signed at the Auckland Airport Tourism Forum in Rotorua on Monday. Most of Northland's visitors are domestic, with overseas tourists only accounting for 20-30 percent of visitors, but Northland Inc. head of destination Tania Burt hoped that would change by working with other tourism leaders. "There's really no reason why we should get more international visitors, so to collaborate with our friends at Auckland Airport and other regions as well, who have strong international visitation, will boost the visibility of Northland." Burt wanted to see more tourists in Northland year-round, so businesses had more consistency, but promoting a region wasn't easy, when tourism funding was often tight and only getting tighter. She was pleased the different regions would share their insights and marketing to promote the North Island as a destination. "When it comes to international marketing, you have to be really smart about where you invest, because people don't have spare marketing dollars lying around. Regional tourism organisation, businesses, even Tourism New Zealand are under constraints." Collaborating was a way to showcase the regions better and create the positive change they wanted, she said. The potential for the North Island was huge. "One thing we like to work by is, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together, so it's time for the North Island to go and Northland has to be part of that." The partnership will initially focus on three key visitor markets - Australia, the US and China. Later this year, more than 60 tourism operators will meet with Australian travel sellers across the ditch at a North Island showcase. RotoruaNZ chief executive Andrew Wilson said competing against other overseas destinations for visitors was hard. "When you go in to a marketplace like Australia, where we're traditionally gone in all independently, we're all fighting for a voice and time with those buyers. Going in collectively, we've got more scale. "We've got more ability basically to encourage those buyers through the door." The North Island had a lot of room to grow and the partnership aligned well with the government's push for more tourist boots on the ground, he said. They would save time and money at a time when belts were tightening. "We've all got to continue to focus in terms of how we do more with less and this is definitely a really strong option in terms of how we do that." TRENZ - the country's largest tourism business event - kicks off in Rotorua on Tuesday. Rotorua was already buzzing before the event, which was last held in there in 2019. Wilson said people would be hard pressed to find an available room in town this week, because hotel bookings were so strong, and other businesses were also benefiting from events and more visitors to the area. "There's a huge amount of business done at TRENZ, which will have an impact obviously for the next three, four, five years in terms of how some of those itineraries are put together." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
04-05-2025
- Health
- RNZ News
Northland's meth crisis: 'There's no magic wand for any of this'
Rural Northland towns like Kaikohe are bearing the brunt of New Zealand's meth crisis. Photo: RNZ/Peter de Graaf Organisations trying to help people get off meth in Northland towns like Kaikohe say they are overwhelmed by "a tsunami of need". More funding - and residential care for addicts trying to quit - is desperately needed to tackle the problem, they say. Wastewater testing has shown methamphetamine use tripled in Northland last year, which now has the unenviable title of meth capital of New Zealand. Tia Ashby heads Te Hau Ora o Ngāpuhi, a Kaikohe-based iwi organisation that provides housing, health services and programmes like Paiheretia, which helps men caught up in the Corrections system. She said the meth crisis was "real, complex and growing". "We see the daily the toll it takes on whānau, on their wairua, their homes and their hope. We do what we can, but the reality is, the demand is outpacing our capacity," she said. "We're just not funded at the scale needed to respond to the tsunami of need we are facing." Jade and Scott - they did not want to give their last names, because their work brings them into contact with organised crime - are employed by Te Hau Ora o Ngāpuhi as kaiarataki, or navigators, helping meth addicts and their whānau get the help they need. Jade said the problem was getting worse, and the money spent on drugs meant other family members missed out on essentials. "The biggest thing that we see is the effect on the kids, on the mokos. You've got whānau that are going without kai, the living conditions can be appalling. It's a real pandemic, you could call it, and has some real atrocious effects." A broken lightbulb in a public toilet in Kaikohe is a telltale sign of meth use. Glass bulbs are sometimes used as improvised pipes for inhaling the drug. Photo: RNZ/Peter de Graaf Scott said the men they helped came with a whole raft of problems, including homelessness, poor health, mental distress, and crime. But when they burrowed deeper, they often found the underlying cause was meth. Scott said there were many reasons behind the drug's prevalence. "Obviously, the cost of living out there. High unemployment. And people's trauma as well. It's about unpacking it all to find out why people are addicted to methamphetamine. It ruins households, it ruins families, it ruins communities, it brings crime. Nothing will ever end good unless people stop taking it." Ashby said the government's Resilience to Organised Crime in Communities ROCC programme, which had so far been rolled out in seven regions across New Zealand, was a good start. Although still in its early stages, ROCC aimed to stop people becoming addicted in the first place. "It will build up resilience within whānau and prevent rangatahi [youth] from ever wanting to pick up the pipe, by making sure they're on the right pathway for education or employment, and not being led by gangs," Ashby said. "The focus needs to be upstream, we don't want to be the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff all the time. But the reality is, those who have addiction need support now. There's no magic wand for any of this." Te Hau Ora o Ngāpuhi chief executive Tia Ashby says the Kaikohe-based organisation is battling a "tsunami of need". Photo: RNZ/Peter de Graaf While ROCC was "a step in the right direction", more and sustainable investment in prevention was needed. Also desperately needed was comprehensive, culturally responsive residential treatment in mid-Northland for people who wanted to come off drugs. Currently most providers of those services, such as Grace Foundation and Higher Ground, were based in Auckland. Ashby said everyone would have to work together to tackle the meth conundrum. Police, MSD, iwi, Māori providers and local services such as Whakaoranga Whānau Recovery Hub were doing their best with the resources they had, she said. "But without the right tools, good intentions can only go so far. It's time to match the scale of the response with the scale of the need." While the meth problem was not new, it hit headlines last month when Ngāpuhi chairman Mane Tahere made a public call for more policing and direct funding for iwi organisations whose work was slowed by government red tape. Northland MP Grant McCallum subsequently met Tahere and Far North Mayor Moko Tepania, who lives in Kaikohe, as well as staff at the local medical centre. He was shocked by the stories they told him. They included accounts of a young man high on meth assaulting staff and "causing mayhem" at the medical clinic, and of drug-induced family dysfunction with girls as young as 11 becoming pregnant. "But the thing that just got me is, you know how when we were growing up, your dad might give you a sip of his beer or something when you're a young kid? Well, in some families, they're giving him a little bit of P." Northland MP Grant McCallum says communities have to make it clear they don't want drugs. Photo: RNZ / Peter de Graaf McCallum said he was pleased Tahere and Ngāpuhi were standing up and saying they had had enough. "We have to try and break this cycle. It won't be fixed in five minutes, but we have to start, and one of the key things we've got to do to help break that cycle is get children to school and keep them there," McCallum said. In the longer term, he said the answer lay in a stronger local economy and a good education system, so people in towns like Kaikohe had well-paying jobs and children had options for their future. "But ultimately - and this applies to any community, we're not picking on Kaikohe here, it's just the first cab off the rank - the community has to own this problem. If they don't want drugs in their community, they need to make it clear they don't want it in their community. And they need to push back and feed information through to the police when they find people dealing." During a recent visit to Whangārei, Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey said the government was focussed on trying to stop drugs entering the border, coming down hard on dealers and organised crime, and taking a health-led approach to drug users. Although wastewater testing had shown a big jump in meth use, other data showed the number of users had not increased significantly. That suggested the same group of people was taking more meth, he said. Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey, seen here during a recent visit to Whangārei, says proceeds of crime could be used to fund more drug treatment services in Northland. Photo: RNZ/Peter de Graaf Doocey offered a sliver of hope to organisations like Te Hau Ora o Ngāpuhi, who were calling out for more funding to prevent people becoming addicted in the first place. "We're looking at the Proceeds of Crime Fund to fund some of that. When you look at some of the high-need areas like Northland, it will be a more targeted response. Also, we'll be looking at how we can resource existing services on the ground, who are already delivering, to scale up to the need," he said. The Proceeds of Crime Fund, which reopened recently for applications after a three-year freeze, would now focus on reducing violent crime. Such crime was often driven by drugs, Doocey said. Meanwhile, back on the front line, Jade said collective action and more funding were vital. "I'm not sure that heavy handedness in the justice system, and filling the jails in a system that isn't working for our people anyway, is the right solution," he said. "It's going to get worse unless we can get ahead of it, and work together in the same direction. I'm not saying we haven't done that in the past but it's going to need an even more collective approach. And I'm hoping people come with wallets open because it's going to need to be funded." Scott highlighted the need for comprehensive residential treatment in Northland, so people didn't need to have to be shipped off to Auckland for help. "You'll never stop drugs, but we can come together and try to minimise it. What that looks like, I don't know. Police are obviously under the pump out there, like everyone else," he said. "I think we need some more healing centres for whānau up here in Kaikohe. I don't like using the word rehabilitation. What's needed is a one-stop shop where people can reside, they can heal, get counselling, work on physical fitness, and the kids can go to school." Whatever the answer, for the kids Scott and Jade see every day, it can not come soon enough. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
