Power and Sediment – the River Battles

By HENZELL, John

Battle lines are being drawn over plans to dam the Mokihinui River, the last major pristine river on the West Coast. JOHN HENZELL previews a resource-consent hearing that is far more complex than it seems.

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Clean and green hydro power is supposed to help save New Zealand’s coastal communities from succumbing to rising sea levels, right? But when Meridian Energy tries to justify its plan to dam the Mokihinui, the West Coast’s third biggest river, it will tell a panel of commissioners that the direct result will be a tripling of the speed at which the sea is eroding towards 36 homes in a classic Kiwi bach community. It highlights the complexities and paradoxes faced by a panel of resource- consent commissioners who on Monday will begin to decide whether to approve a project with the potential to make the West Coast self-sufficient for all its current and projected power needs, freeing up electricity from the Waitaki scheme for the rest of New Zealand. The commissioners will know that the hydro project on the largely pristine river about 40km north of Westport has elicited strong reactions from each side of the debate. State Owned Enterprises minister Trevor Mallard calls it a “proposal . . . of national significance” and among the submitters in support at the hearing in Westport are the Ministry of Economic Development and the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority. In opposition are groups like the Greens, normally in favour of carbon- neutral power generation, but who are vowing to make the project an election issue. Their view is that if a river as unspoiled as the Mokihinui is converted to hydro, “this dam would set a precedent that leaves no river safe”. Their position is supported by Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society, which describes the river as “a wilderness treasure” that it helped save from logging in the 1980s and will fight just as hard to save from hydro now. For all the organised groups and government departments, there are also the hundred or so people who live full time in the 11km between the intended dam site and where the Mokihinui ends its journey to the Tasman Sea. The same ructions that divide the national groups are repeated in microcosm here. Walk into the utterly deserted bar of the Seddonville Hotel on a weekday afternoon and the reticence of assistant manager Loraine Woods says as much as her words. Her initial reluctance to talk reflects the vexed topic the dam has become in the valley and there’s a prudent decision not to express a view in a bid to avoid alienating anyone. “It has sort of divided the community. I think most of the people here don’t want it,” she explains. “A lot of people come here because it’s off the beaten track. This is a nice little piece of New Zealand that hasn’t changed in the last 50 years. “We’ve got a nice quiet life here and a lot of people don’t like change.” Currently, the closest the valley gets to peak hour is the twice-daily arrival of the milk tanker, but all that would change if the dam was built. It would require a major upgrade of the road and then the convoys of trucks for the dam-construction phase, after which life would go back towards normal again, with just a handful of people needed to run the hydro scheme. At the Mokihinui River mouth, 11km away from the dam site and on the other side of the highway from the construction traffic, the bach settlement of Mokihinui has a permanent population of six, but its population swells for the whitebaiting season, due to begin in just over a week. Being on the other side of the highway from the construction traffic, Mokihinui might seem to be insulated from the issue but it’s one of the flashpoints. Meridian’s engineers worked out that if the dam goes ahead, the absence of sediment normally transported down the river in flood will exacerbate erosion as the ocean steadily approaches the 30-odd homes. After the Murchison earthquake of 1929 caused slips through the Mokihinui gorge – ironically creating several natural dams – sediment flow increased and built up the shoreline. But for the past 50 years, it has been steadily eroded as rising sea levels eat away the coast. In the past 20 years, the sea progressed by about a metre a year near the township. Now, standing on the shore looking out to sea means standing on a bund bulldozed out of the shingle in an attempt to slow the pace of erosion. Brian Morgan, who owns a farm south of Mokihinui, has a large beach frontage protected by the wall. “That’s just a sacrifice wall. Sometimes we get four or five years out of them,” he said. “There are quite a few against the dam, but if it doesn’t go ahead, we’ve still got to come up with something (about the erosion). I’m all for it.” Meridian’s negotiations include paying for two-thirds of a substantial sea wall, down to below the low-water mark, at a potential overall cost of between $700,000 and $1 million. With fewer than 40 homes, the cost of the community taking it on would be impractical. Even its minority share, to be paid via a West Coast Regional Council levy, is going to be a significant drain for some. True to popular images of the Coast, Morgan’s other concern is one word: whitebait. “The scientists tell us it will be all right, so we’ve got to go by what they say,” he says. “Like everywhere, we have good years and bad years for whitebaiting. You can guarantee that if the dam goes ahead, the first year will be a bad year and they’ll say it’s the dam.” In Mokihinui, one of the six permanent residents is Basil Climo, who sees Meridian’s offer to help fund a proper sea wall as crucial to swinging opinions towards it. “I think the dam will be a good thing, so long as Mokihinui is protected from erosion,” he says. “I think most people realise they’ve got to do something about protecting their houses. We’ve been losing between half a metre and a metre each year and especially since they did the extension to the wall at Westport harbour in the 1970s. That will increase to three to 3.5m because of the dam. “A lot of people here put in to be heard at the hearing, but now there are a lot who aren’t bothering because the discussions with Meridian are going quite well.”

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