When it comes to the torrents, Manawatū also has history

Peter Lampp is a sports commentator and former Manawatū Standard sports editor based in Palmerston North.

OPINION: While the nether regions of the North Island have got off lightly with the extreme rain so far this year, we in Manawatū shouldn’t forget recent history.

It seems like yesterday, but it was almost two decades ago, when Manawatū and Horowhenua were featuring on TV bulletins with broadcaster Paul Holmes boating out to flooded farmhouses, dairy cows floating downriver out to sea and the bridge over the Pohangina River at Ashhurst swept away.

In more recent times when writing the Manawatū Golf Club’s latest history book, Forever In Bounds, I set about researching Manawatū’s floods dating back to the highest on record, a one-in-500-year monster in 1880 of 4000 cumecs.

I expected Horizons Regional Council to have had records of the big Manawatū floods or for someone to have written a book on the subject. But after failing to elicit anything from Horizons, one of their retired former engineers, Derek McKee, a handy lawn bowler, agreed to help.

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He had played a big part in enlarging the stop banks so that Palmerston North is now largely protected, which it will need to be with houses being built at Centennial Drive close to the stopbanks.

In 2012, the stopbanks were raised to 5 metres and widened to 3 metres, theoretically sufficient to withstand a one-in-500-year flood of 4500 cumecs. The stopbanks are the biggest in the country.

The so-called 70-year flood in 2004 was fed by 250mm of rain dumped on the Ruahine Range; Auckland recently copped 245mm in one day.

I ended up devoting half a chapter on the Manawatū River bursting its banks, sparked by the inundation in 1992 and the most recent mega-flood in 2004 cascading over the golf club’s then unprotected 16th green.

Since 1880, the Manawatū River has had 17 massive floods of 2194 cumecs or more. In 2004 it was 3515 cumecs, the third largest. Much of Palmerston North went under in the 1902 and 1953 floods and in 1941 water almost reached Ferguson St.

I know sport should barely come into the equation when people in Auckland and Northland have had their houses tumbling.

But while we in Manawatū have been spared so far this year, remember the 2004 flood took place in this month, February, and displaced about 3000 people.

We should be aware of the danger because not everyone is. About three weeks ago when walking across the Fitzherbert Bridge with the Manawatū River running high, we spotted two little girls descending right to the water’s edge to play. One slip and they would’ve been gone and probably a parent who went to the rescue.

It was frightening enough in 2004 venturing a fair distance from the river at the golf course at Hokowhitu to hear trees snapping as the raging water impacted. The $7 million spent by Horizons on enlarging the stopbanks saved Palmerston North that day.

In sport, golf clubs appear to bear the brunt and most of the courses on our west coast sand country are still bearing the scars from last winter’s torrents, clearly having angered old Zeus, the ancient Greek god of weather.

We now know there’s a limit to how much sand country water tables can absorb, which we previously believed were all-weather absorbent. The damaged Levin Golf Club at Moutere and Rangitīkei at Bulls have water rivulets where they have never been before and the drowning has scoured their fairways. One veteran Rangitīkei member told me he’d played there for 60 years and had never seen the like.

The sand courses at Marton and Paraparaumu Beach were drowned last winter and Foxton’s was closed for months.

The Palmerston North Golf Club was sited on city council flood-prone land in the suburb of Brightwater and is now protected by lofty stopbanks.

But silt from floods such as that in 1965 has affected the drainage on much of the course and heavy rain often closes it or the use of golf carts had to be ruled out.

In that 1965 flood, only the clubhouse remained above water and left silt up to a metre deep, some greens had to be rebuilt and fairways were disced, harrowed and re-sown on top of the silt deposit.

Two months before its centennial in 2004, the Feilding Golf Club incurred similar silting when the Ōroua River took out 150 metres of stopbank and the 12th hole, leaving the course littered with vegetables from nearby farms. The club had also lost some land in the 1992 flood.

The Pahīatua Golf Club often sees its back holes disappear underwater when the Mangataīnoka River bursts its banks.

Rugby is one sport, which at senior level refuses to succumb to heavy rain.

Not so long ago when city fields were closed, club matches were regularly chased out to Ashhurst Domain and played in bogs.