This is a Guest post by Wellington Architect Guy Marriage
Wellingtonians get a hard press in the Auckland papers sometimes, but last Thursday we thoroughly deserved it. We are normally a fairly resilient lot, and put up with more than our fair share of howling wind and torrential rain at times, but regularly battle through with trains and buses all performing admirably. Even our regular rush hour traffic jams only just live up to their name, and are normally well over within the hour. We know about Auckland’s horrific traffic, and sympathies, we really do. But last Thursday, we suffered a total melt-down, and for a supposedly heavily resilient city, that was a pretty big fall from grace. So what happened?
As you may have heard, broadcast all over the evening news, we had a bit of excess rain. About 8 times more rain in an hour than we get in a month, or some such unbelievably wet statistic like that. And then the big wet went on and on, and eventually we had some slips, where our glorious hills decided they didn’t want to be vertical any more, and so they poured out over the flat bits along the edge of the water. Unfortunately for Wellington, all of our escape routes out of the city run along the same flat stretch of road to the Hutt, and so a small slip on the Hutt Road blocked off a route north along State Highway 2, diverting all the SH2 traffic to SH1. Doubly unfortunate really, because on the other side of the hills, SH1 was also blocked off, and that meant they had to send all the traffic back to SH2, over SH58. There is only one other road, the Paekakariki Hill Road, which is narrow and windy, and is frequently blocked by slips anyway, so inevitably that blocked up too. No way in, no way out. The capital was blocked off from the rest of New Zealand. Did you miss us?
The road was therefore bumper to bumper traffic jam from Wellington all the way to Porirua, and also at a standstill over the hills back to the Hutt Valley on the other side. If you’re not from Wellington, then none of that will make sense, and the nearest I can give you as an example is if the Harbour Bridge was closed, and the NorthWestern motorway was closed as well, and all the traffic between Manukau and Auckland was diverted via Puhoi, and then all the cars stopped moving. Yes, exactly, a stuff-up in traffic terms of monumental proportions, one considerably worse than the average Friday night jam in Auckland, and we will inevitably face calls for yet more roads to be built, just in case this happens again.
But wait, there’s more. Surely none of those road closures matter, as Wellington is the most public-transport oriented city in the nation, is it not? Well, yes, but on Thursday even that let us down as well. Every single train to every single destination was cut, and the central Wellington Railway Station was closed down. That’s a station that normally is about 3 times busier than Britomart, and we have shiny new trains too for the most part. But that accursed rain had deluged rocks and washed out gravel over every set of tracks. Replacement buses normally suffice when there is a traffic setback, but with all the roads and all the rail out, there was no way that the few remaining charter buses could keep up with the demand. The city actually took the unheard of step of telling all commuters from out of town to stay in town, spend the night with friends, to rent a room or borrow a couch, and give up entirely on moving anywhere. I’m not sure if that has happened to any city in living memory before, outside of a war zone. Even when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, or when Super-Storm Sandy hit New York, they were still able to move people in and out of the city. But not Wellington, not last week. The only methods of transport still working were the planes (if you wanted to fly to Auckland and drive back down to Upper Hutt) and the ferries, which gave you a choice of sailing through the storm to Picton, or in a much smaller ferry, riding the waves up to Petone beach. Except of course that Petone beach has a damaged pier, and one of the small East-West Ferry boats was out of action, so that left just one small catamaran sailing back and forth to Petone all evening. I was fully expecting my floor to be full of refugees from the storm, but it was, miraculously, fugee-free.
Not that it really made the slightest bit of difference to Wellingtonians however. Within the city itself, there was a fair bit of wetness, more than usual, but nothing was broken. Everything still worked, everyone got home. Buses still ran, taxis still taxied, and cyclist continued to ride on their non-existent cycle network. We haven’t got a cycle network yet, because some pathetic councillors went feral, and have slowed everything down for reasons known only to themselves. We are, it seems, the only city in New Zealand with a pro-Green, fervently cycling Mayor, and yet we have not a single functioning separated cycle lane anywhere of any use on any major traffic route, which seems just a little bit odd. While the usual dips and hollows were fuller of water than usual, it seemed to me that the city performed admirably well, and lived up to its resilient reputation. You could have even thrown in a moderate earthquake or two, and the city would have shrugged them off as well, due to the steady stream of strengthening projects that have been going on. We’re a city that is like a brand new iPhone 6, already with a sturdy waterproof, shockproof rubber case on, and you could drop us from the upstairs balcony and we wouldn’t break, at least not completely. But we might bend a little if you sat on us.
But what this points to is that while Wellington City might be tough enough in parts, its the Regional Council and NZTA that were shown up as monumentally unprepared for disaster. I think we have just seen the biggest case for abolition of the Regional Council, right there. What if it had been a real, serious disaster, not just a few hours of torrential rain? The Civil Defence motto down here is “Get Through.” Clearly, that is not something that we yet can do.
NZTA have started work on the billion dollar highway known as Transmission Gully, an ironic name as they could only start work there when they had removed all the transmission lines, in case they fell over while they were digging out the gully road. One day, after an inevitable cost inflation to (probably) nearly two billion dollars, there will be a new road north, two lanes each way, all the way, and a new Petone to Granada link road – and you know what? If both of those roads had been built already, those other traffic snafu may well have happened just the same. The Petone to Grenada route will have to involve the moving / removal of some eight million cubic metres of rock, which won’t be an easy task. The Transmission Gully route still relies on sending all the traffic along the waterfront and up the Ngauranga Gorge, both of which were heavily affected by last week’s rain, with several small slips/rockfalls and a lane taken out of action in the Gorge. Transmission Gully is also sitting firmly on an earthquake fault line and highly susceptible to slips as well, so there is a lot of work to be done securing hillsides before that route will ever be “safe”. We need NZTA to try a whole lot harder to battle-harden the existing network and we need Kiwirail and GWRC to make sure that public transport is a whole lot more resilient down here.
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The defining attribute of Wellington city, other than it is host to the nation’s government, is its geographical containment, which is really very pronounced. It is hard to think of other cities as gloriously isolated as Wellington; Venice perhaps?
Interesting really that the city itself was fine through this event and really it was the connections to its suburbs that faltered. Good then that this century has seen such a return to living in the city; I bet the bars, restaurants, and hotels did a roaring trade.
Nice work Guy; care to become our Wellington correspondent?
More like Genova than Venice. Plenty of slips and traffic jams every autumn there as well. Unfortunately for Genova she’s already had the Flyover/elevated motorway treatment, that Renzo Piano proposed to resolve. Not gonna happen.
One example is Juneau, which has no road connection to the rest of Alaska, despite being the capital. And that’s 100% of the time, not just for one day a decade.
Decent planning doesn’t plan for events like last Thursday’s storm. They are too infrequent and to build to that standard would mean massive over-building and therefore many $$$ that don’t need to be spent. I learned that you build to 95% peak, and live with whatever the other 5% throws at you. Same for once in a decade storms. Patrick is right. This incident had a lot more to do with preparedness – shoring up unstable slopes or being more selective about where you build in the first place – than a lack of highways. Also, Thursday’s disaster probably won’t happen again, but they’ll be prepared for it! Always fighting the last battle.
Like Wellington, Auckland’s rail service needs to plan for the next ‘disaster’ since the current recovery time for comparitively minor incidents, is overly long. We need to look at how things are done in Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. The fact that those places have larger populations is irrelevant – its how they plan and how quickly they move to manage disaster that is the key to making Auckland’s PT network resilient.
Rob, one of the ways of future-proofing Auckland’s rail network would be to get more grade separation – I was fairly amazed last time i was up there to find several level rail crossings on inner city roads – Auckland really does need to remove those intersections from their network, if they want a smooth running system. We still have some at intersections like Plimmerton, but there is a limited number of people living in Plimmerton by the beach, and that’s a fair bit different from Porters Ave and Normanby Road. Obviously these things cost money, and obviously the Japanese have more money than we do, but still: we need to plan ahead.
60 years of no money for capital improvement will do that. The religious-level objection to investing in steel wheeled transport is still alive and well in the corridors of power, as are the effects of its legacy. This will change, how soon is hard to say.
Having been in HK for a period and many visits to Japan, I can’t believe how backward NZ is in maintaining unstable slopes and preventing landslips. You would think all the obvious places including that rail section along the water to Petone would be engineered to take anything. Track ballast can be replaced with fixed slab track. Drainage with concreted drains.
You see the average Japanese coastline these days it is covered in different barrages, breakwaters and stuff to stop the tsunamis and typhoon damage the best that can be done.
And why bother with all these tunnels if they don’t tunnel under the worst of the slopes?
Stevenz – absolutely agree, but it was interesting nonetheless to see how quickly the normally smooth running system fell apart. We’re used to the rail occasionally getting knocked out on one line, or the highways getting restricted in one direction, but for virtually every means of transport to fail at the same time was, in Wellington’s history, somewhat disastrous. All back to normal the day after, of course. But we do need to foresee the next disaster, not the last one.
Yes, you could say it was (and I’ll never use this term again, I promise) the perfect storm for a transport disaster!
Promise? I do so much hate that over-used term… and the movie was crap as well.
Yep. Agree with all of you so far.
Rather than “Get Through’ it would be more honest to say “Fend for yourself”. People tell me you need a good pair of shoes to get through a disaster in Wellington but I think a mountain bike might be more use as you will probably have to make your own way up to Paraparaumu where aid can be brought in by road rail and air and where the walking wounded can be treated.
In this case though why bother? Wellington city was fine, and it is a place particularly well set about with bars and restaurants, all well stocked for considerable occupation. Rather than ‘get through’ more a case of ‘stay put’ happily.
So long a Wellington lifts in the next big quake rather than reverts then staying put would be fine. Check out the shoreline 500 years ago. http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/4383/wellington-harbour-before-the-haowhenua-earthquake
Good point; is it generally subducting or uplifting, or is it so riven with major faults that it all can happen, and probably will?
Kinda depends, there is a whole pile of reverse faults. Generally anything that is east of the Wellington fault that ruptures will uplift Wellington/Hutt Valley and anything west (including the Wellington fault) will drop it down. The existence of the Hutt Valley in the context of an uplifting region means that the Wellington fault is more dominant.
A lady was on National radio this morning saying they now have evidence of subduction faults. (They had always assumed them so it won’t change any planning.) At a subduction fault land tends to lift but the land away from the fault can drop. So if it goes at the motorway then Wellington should go up. If it goes elsewhere it could drop up to 1/2 a metre. She said the site she investigated showed a Tsunami after the quake 800 years ago but didnt prove one occurred 500 years ago but absence at that site didnt mean one didnt occur elsewhere.
One of the issues I have read about for Wellington is they can get a Tsunami in the harbour due to tipping and a basin effect with multiple sloshings. http://wellington.govt.nz/webmap/wccmap.html lets you see a Tsunami overlay. (click 3rd from bottom left)
Yeah, we’re almost certainly bound to go up rather than down, as the Pacific plate is riding up over the Australian plate in this part of town. Unfortunately, we’re right above the point where they are currently stuck, so when it goes, it’ll go with a bang…. and with a bit of luck, if anyone is left alive, there will be lots of new shoreline! Room for all the new immigrant Aucklanders to come down and buy a waterfront section!
The real bummer bit is that apparently on one side of Cook Strait we have one plate above the other – and then the situation is reversed on the other side of the ditch. Doesn’t really bode well if you think about it – but currently they are in a stalemate cross-over pattern. Won’t last forever though – the weight of the entire floating continental Pacific plate is pushing sideways, and one day, perhaps in a thousand years, or less, the joint will bust open. So in the mean time, we just talk about the weather.
So long as you don’t use the new coastline just as somewhere handy to put a rail line and a motorway like Wellington did last time!
‘The newly exposed strip of shoreline between Wellington and the Hutt Valley offered a safe road and railway route – parts of the coastal road had previously been impassable at high tide. ‘
http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/historic-earthquakes/page-3
The 1575 earthquake in Valdivia lifted land out of the sea. Houses and farms were built on that new land. The 1960 earthquake dropped the land again by a few metres, flooding it. When I visited there was plenty of evidence of submerged buildings and farmland, which also survived the large tsunamis that followed the quake. http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/hazardimages/picture/show/1665
I would not want to make any predictions as to what direction the land might go during the next big Wellington quake.
A good general outlining of Wellington’s experience last week, thanks Guy. While agreeing with most of the article I will take issue with two key statements:
1) “Surely none of those road closures matter, as Wellington is the most public-transport oriented city in the nation, is it not? Well, yes, but on Thursday even that let us down as well.”
Well as a city that has high PT usage and dependency, Wellington is naturally vunerable to PT service failure. Last week’s storm caused the passenger rail service to totally fail but the vast majority of bus services continued operation and were effective in getting people home even with the adverse road conditions. I bused home to North Wellington City … although it did take quite a bit longer due to my bus (heading north along SH1) getting caught with all those trying to drive home to either Porirua and the Hutt Valley ( it was really only stop/start at the approach to Ngarunga Gorge). The only Wellington City residents who had real problems were those who railed in from Tawa as they were stuck (although most would probably have found a lift home).
2) “NZTA have started work on the billion dollar highway known as Transmission Gully, … . One day, after an inevitable cost inflation to (probably) nearly two billion dollars, there will be a new road north, two lanes each way, all the way, and a new Petone to Granada link road – and you know what? If both of those roads had been built already, those other traffic snafu may well have happened just the same. ”
I think I speak for most Wellingtonians when I say that the key word here is “may”. Sure, if Transmission Gully and Petone to Grenada had been built they too may have failed … but they may not have failed in which case the impact from the strom would have been much milder … even if the rail service had failed.
What the storm proved to most Wellingtonians is that we depend on fragile transport links that are proven to fail even in a rain storm (let alone an earthquake). This is simply unacceptable and so something must be done … and something IS being done.
$2 billion (or whatever the final price) is a vast amount of money to spend on “maybe” proofing against the occasional glitch such as this. A fraction of that money could go a long way towards increasing the resilience of the existing transport network, including those bits which will still be critical even with Transmission Gully.
If there really is a pressing need for an emergency escape route, this does not have to be a $2 billion gold-plated motorway. A 2-lane, 80Km/h alignment could provide this function at a far lower cost. The poor business case for Transmission Gully is being shored up by a raft of excuses as to why it is so “necessary”.
In economic terms, the government is going way over the top with its RoNS programme, and the belt-tightening and lost-opportunities which will result from this are likely to be penal. Just like Muldoon’s “Think Big” projects, only worse.
P.S. There is still time for some sane people-of-influence to work out a way to stop this, assuming this country still has such people.
“$2 billion (or whatever the final price) is a vast amount of money to spend on “maybe” proofing against the occasional glitch such as this.”
You are right, $2B IS a lot of money.
” A fraction of that money could go a long way towards increasing the resilience of the existing transport network, including those bits which will still be critical even with Transmission Gully.”
Really, where ? I think the core problem is that all the “little” improvements have already been done … only the big stuff is left … like TG.
“P.S. There is still time for some sane people-of-influence to work out a way to stop this, assuming this country still has such people.”
Well, if anything, the rain bomb Wellington experienced last Thursday only reinforced people’s desire and commitment to getting TG built, a belief that is being reinforced (exploited ?) by NZTA.
“Really, where ? I think the core problem is that all the “little” improvements have already been done … only the big stuff is left … like TG.”
There is a lot of “little stuff” that could be done to make the rail network more resilient (slope-reinforcement or re-profiling, debris-catchers or shelters, replacement or strengthening of vulnerable structures, culvert and drainage augmentation, foreshore re-armouring and buffering, better proofing of sensitive equipment against water-effects).
And then the big stuff. Extend rail to provide more coverage of the region, particularly south of Wellington City. This would also deliver an alternative transport option where limited roading options are all that exist at the moment. Is the ‘official’ plan of only building a motorway really the best answer? I think not, as it makes us even more dependent on this one mode.
And among all the likely disaster scenarios being thought up, has the vulnerability of NZ’s oil supply been considered?
Of course, NZTA have been quick to take credit for Transmission Gully to be the potential saviour to this debacle ever happening again…:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/68637818/how-the-transmission-gully-motorway-would-have-saved-wellington
Sane people of influence? No such thing under National, it would seem. “More roads!” is the only cry i hear from their mouths…
In the floods of Dec 76 the roads and rail were out for 2 or more days. That event was greater in that the intensity went on for more hours than last weeks event. After that 76 event there was an upgrade of drains and other engineering such as rubbish arresters in streams. The one area that caused problems in both events was the Korokoro Stream, where SH2 meets the Petone foreshore but it appears that the other areas that caused problems in 1976 didn’t cause any problems beside surface flooding that cleared when the rain stopped.
By 5.30 when I left work, the road to the Hutt was open and I had one of my fastest peak time runs home ever!
Neville – thanks for that – a bit before my time in Wellington, but yes, I heard that the floods of 76 were huge. Interesting that the Korokoro stream has been a big disrupter on both those occasions. I must say though, you were lucky to have a clear run home at 5.30 – it must be because everyone left the city early to try and get home – and in doing so, caused the very jam they were trying hard to avoid.
That’s the thing with Wellington roading – there’s bugger all available redundancy in the system. In a grid city like New York or Los Angeles, there’s always another road you can take. In Wellington, at just one or two strategic spots in the system, there is no alternative. Block one of those spots, and its like cutting down all the bridges to an island. Of course, those left on the island are quite happy to stay there and drink martinis by the pool, but it avoids the point that you can’t get off….
Not to pile on, but to add to the very many advantages of city living you can reasonably walk home when all else fails.
Those of us who bicycled to work that day and managed to dodge the showers had a pretty ordinary day!
One thing that Metlink could do better when the trains are not working is to communicate any alternative standard PT services (if any) there are to get someone back home. For example, I live in Porirua, and the bus route I took was 211, that goes back to Porirua via Johnsonville and Tawa. Passengers could also catch a bus to Johnsonville and then get a transfer fare to another bus to get them to Porirua/Tawa (all run by the same company Mana/Newlands). Sure, it took a while with the traffic, but at least there were some options! Communicating some of these options would have been the difference between $6.50 for the bus, or hundreds of dollars on a hotel! The only reason why I knew about these alternatives, is because I make it my business to know every way out of Wellington, whether that is PT, road, cycling or walking!
Hmmmm. Thursday’s failures were pretty cataclysmic, but it was impressive how quickly they were resolved. People took heed of the advice not to travel into work on the Friday, they took heed of the advice to hit the road early on Thursday or stay put for the night, and people coped with it in a resolute manner.
We have a pretty good ability to cope with systemic failure across the entire network in the short term. The critical point here is that the failures were minor enough to be resolved easily. It’s clear there are major vulnerabilities across the entire Wellington road network, and the only way to resolve those issues is to provide a viable alternative. That will mean better harbour ferry services, and better connections at each end of those services. It’ll mean targeted upgrades to the interior road network (including the hill suburbs), and an ability to manage traffic through those routes in emergencies. No amount of motorway building will resolve the vulnerabilities that already exist in the network – but we can manage the alternatives.
Thanks James and George for your comments. I’ve been thinking – about places like the Otira Gorge – where they rebuilt the road route through, but in doing so, recognised the frequent washouts and high likelihood of debris collapse (as well as being the highest earthquake risk area in the entire country). They (NZTA / Beca) decided that it was better for some areas to be formed in a tunnel – or rather they built a shelter over the road, to form a tunnel. Like this: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5314/5904349418_47e35f815f_b.jpg
Seems like we should be thinking about a relatively simple device like this at key points where streams intersect.
I fail to see how tmg would be any more resilient in a civil defence emergency than the existing opions.
Really ? Well it may be unclear when you are looking from Auckland but from here in Wellington City having three roads to get over the northern hills seems a lot better than two … especially when both the current roads can be closed by rain ….
Yup, it’d be a huge difference: then Wellington would have three roads that can be closed by rain. (Or rather, five, including Paekak Hill and Akatarawa, but those close at the drop of a hat and can’t realistically take trucks).
Well, in a decade we may find out who is right 🙂
Luke: It’s not really 3, or 5 roads than can be closed by rain. It’s just one. Every single road north (with the exception of rat running through endless suburbs) has to go along the foreshore, and that’s the most vulnerable part of all – and regularly gets blocked every day. Rain just makes it worse. Once they get to Ngauranga Gorge, there is a choice of two – either continue along the foreshore (which, as noted, is easy to get blocked by bad weather), or to drive up the hill, up the Gorge, and that itself is reasonably frequently blocked by events as well.
Transmission Gully is miles past that – so you have to go through the two worst points to even get to have a choice of 5. TMG is probably the best option they can realistically come up with, other than a tunnel, but it certainly is still vulnerable to every single ripple up the Gorge.
And the down-side of Transmission Gully is that on a normal, non-disaster day, it will encourage heaps more traffic into Wellington City. Some will be new traffic taking advantage of the new opportunity thus provided, and some will be patronage abstracted from the parallel rail service – a consequence freely admitted by NZTA. This extra traffic will end up in Wellington or the Hutt Valley. The very opposite of stated regional transport policy to encourage public transport use and reduce traffic.
Oh, and of course the other negative effect will be the lost opportunity to do something better with the money such as extending the reach of the under-exploited regional rail system. If this motorway splurge proceeds as-planned, it is hard to envisage there being anything else in the kitty for decades to come.
So these negatives will be with us and penalising us on a daily basis for goodness knows how long, for the sake of the occasional glitch or disaster for which the new road may or may even not be useful. (A lower-cost, lower-capacity, lower-speed emergency-road would make a lot more sense in addressing this need if it is really considered essential).
Oh yes, and of course there will be small time-savings to motorists as they arrive more quickly at the worsened traffic jams elsewhere. Public transport users will see stuff all improvement except perhaps more empty seats to choose from on the trains.
Thank goodness Auckland seems to be learning that this is not the way to do things any more, after decades of being the cheer-leader for failed motorway-based transport policies!
This wellingtonian still fails to see how a n additional motorway at the bottom of a gorge offers any signifigant resillience. Thanks for the geography lesson btw, quite unnecessary tho.