Flooded Wairoa Yacht Club says council warned years before on river bar

The Hawke's Bay Regional Council is being accused of mismanagement on the Wairoa River bar as the town mops up from yet another devastating flood.

Heavy machinery was used to try and open a channel in the bar, but was lost to flooding as the water levels rose as severe weather hit the region.

Several locals have complained the regional council left it to late to try and clear the river's path into the sea - and that the storm was already upon them before contractors were given the all clear.

The council is investigating whether a channel on the Wairoa River bar should have been dug sooner to release the swollen river, admitting it may have contributed to the flooding.

Decisions about opening the bar were made on the best forecasting information available at the time, it said.

"I guess we can all agree that if the mouth could have been opened earlier, there would have been far less impact on those communities who are quite vulnerable," chairperson Hinewai Ormsby said.

Wairoa Yacht Club's basement, where it stores boats, flooded and for the first time in its flooding history, the water rose above the club room's floor level, which was 2.5m above the storage floor.

"It was 100 millimetres over the floor, so we've been inundated with silt right through the upper part of the club room," Commodore Adrian Mayhead told Midday Report.

They had been warning the council to do something about the river bar for years after seeing how easily there were becoming flooded from smaller amounts of rainfall, he said.

"We just kept getting the floods. So after [Cyclone] Gabrielle, which was a cyclone, and yes, one would have expected that sort of thing to happen in those conditions [but] this is our eighth event since Gabrielle. Now that shouldn't happen with the amount of rainfall that we get, even this latest one.

"We voiced our concern about the position of the bar and gave our reasons why we were confused with the sudden rise of water."

He said it was not until another letter to the council after another flooding that they got a response, saying a flood warning group was monitoring the rainfall and knew the alignment of the river mouth was not beneficial.

"[With] the amount of technology that's available now, with the easy push of a button, you can have 10 days [heads up ahead of] what's coming up globally.

"So in my own experience I was well aware that we had a significant rain weather event approaching us 10 days prior to Tuesday.

"Now if you say on Friday, we're gonna have these contractors on standby until we tell them to go, they're not taking their opportunity to open it."

Resident Paul Macalo also believed what happened with the flooding was completely avoidable.

"That's normally what we have [in terms of rainfall] ... but we flooded right through."

Contractor Hamish Pryde, who is involved in helping clear the Wairoa river mouth, told Nine to Noon "the horse had bolted" by the time they got the call.

Pryde said dealing with mother nature was unpredictable.

"Assessments were made and we ended up flooding, so I guess the risk assessment by somebody was faulty."

Pryde said they got the call Monday afternoon which he described as "very late notice".

"The storm was already upon us by the time we got the go-ahead to go out and do that so we were always on a losing battle."

They lost three machines during the operation overnight after parking them in a place that was normally safe.

He said they would attempt to salvage them on Thursday.