This was the sight that greeted early morning visitors to Patiti Point May 1st. The developer put the rocks there the night before, claiming he was only blocking off “his property”. In the sober light of day the barricade looked a bit pathetic, and it was soon removed.
Nothing special about today: 2.1 m tide; barometer 1010; moderate swell from the south. But look where the sea got to at high tide!
The NZ Govt document Coastal Hazards and Climate Change: A guidance manual for local government in New Zealand warns of the following impacts on New Zealand’s coastal areas due to accelerating sea-level rise:
The manual continues by warning about the increased hazard created by the removal of coastal vegetation, and risks associated with storm surge, “where adverse winds and low barometric pressure produced by storms temporarily elevate the ocean level well above the predicted tide level” and wave run-up which is, “treated separately from storm-tide level because it varies widely along the coast, even in the same locality, due to differences in shoreline steepness and type of natural or artificial coastal barrier.”
People who frequent South Beach near Patiti Point will tell you that the wave patterns and the shoreline steepness change from day to day in this locality, and that it is an increasingly common occurrence for the waves to roll right up the beach and fill pools behind the main wall of shingle.
Good weather prevailing throughout this period meant the high tides passed off without incident. You can see where the sea gets to by spotting seaweed in the lower carpark at Patiti Point. This photo was taken at 6pm on April 9th with a 2.4 m tide and a high barometer. The sea was calm with a moderate swell which surfers made the most of in the last of the day’s sunshine.
Christmas Day 2007 Tangaroa gently made his presence felt along South Beach.
High water was about 5pm with a height of 2.4 metres and only gulls were around to witness the sea creep up to the Timaru Creek outfall pipe. The barometer was low, around 996 looking at the isobaric chart for 6pm.
It’s a warning of things to come, because there was a flat calm, and very little lift in the sea.
An article on NIWA’s site is quite conservative about rises in sea level due to global warming, pointing out that they are masked by the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation and by El Nino events. By contrast, an article in National Geographic dated 2004 predicted catastrophic rises in sea level in the event that Greenland’s Ice Shelf melts. Since then most of us have become familiar with video from Greenland showing the Ice Shelf melting. On National Radio Christmas Eve Grant Redvers, an environmental scientist aboard the research vessel Tara navigating near to the North Pole, pointed out that the melting of ice removes large areas of reflective surface further accelerating global warming. In a later post I will look more closely at the exact line taken by the 50-year and 100-year hazard lines.
Tuesday 11th December Jeff Elston, Pam Booth, Ian Waite and Sue Lowe attended a council meeting, and Jeff presented some facts about the historical significance of several sites contained in an area from Coupland’s building in the north to the lagoon at Otipua in the south. From north to south: a whalers lookout; the original government landing services site; the place (at the bottom of Queen Street) where Bishop Selwyn held the first ever divine service in South Canterbury; the Hine te Kura stream; the Hine te Kura encampment; Wellers whaling station 1838-1845; Peeress Town 1874-1888; an archeological site at Patiti Point Reserve itself; and the Tipua lagoon where the remains of a giant were found. Jeff gave a lucid account, painting a picture of an area of considerable historical significance, his opinion well-supported with documentation. The Historic Places Trust requirements are all in evidence: aesthetic, archaeological, cultural, historical, spiritual, and traditional qualities. This may be a place of sacred significance to Maori. There were no questions, and each of the councilors received a package for their later perusal.
By all accounts the Peeress had a rough time of it on her 118 day voyage from Gravesend, London. She arrived in Lyttleton in July 1874. Four children were born on the voyage out, and six people died. If you see your name here it may be that your family came out on the Peeress, you may already know that. When these people arrived they were housed at Peeress Town, and when you’re standing in the car park at South Beach immediately by Patiti Point you’re standing right on the site (look in the maps section for the overlay).
Among the passengers who landed were:
Bailey, Beere, Blackwell, Blake, Boyer, Brown, Bryan, Butler,
Carter, Castle, Clancey, Coles, Cook,
Darby, Davis,
Earl,
Fly, Foulkes,
Gabb, George, Gilbert, Godfrey, Gray, Grey, Gurney,
Hart, Hayes, Hillyer, Hiorns, Hoare, Holder, Horsley, Hubbard, Hunt,
Joyce, Judge,
Kenyon, Knight,
Mainer, Mann, Maycock, Metson, Mills, Morgan,
Naughton, Neal, Noble,
Payne, Paynton, Phillips, Poole, Powell, Price, Prue,
Robinson,
Seaby, Sell, Shave, Smith, Southward, Stapely, Stewart, Symes,
Taplin, Tooth, Tubb,
Wallace, Waller, Washington, Watts, Wheeler, Wilcox,
Wild, Wilkes, Willingham, Winrow, Woodford.
The site of Peeress Town is of historical significance, and it is in the future it may be listed with Historic Places Trust. You can read more about the voyage of the Peeress on the NZ GenWeb Project.
When I arrived in Timaru from the UK ten years ago, seeing the town that would be my new home for the first time, I thought what a charming but hotch-potch place it was. Everywhere I looked I saw pragmatic solutions: a spindly pedestrian bridge linking the seamens mission to the red light district; a port feeder road like a helter skelter borrowed from the fairground below; a carpark on a roof; a statue facing the public toilets. It’s like nobody planned the place, it just grew up organically like a child’s railway layout. I was amazed to be in a country where I could choose any design for my house and plonk it down much as I pleased within a reasonably flexible framework of rules. Fast forward to now and I start to see the problem: the short-term approach to planning is coming home to roost. The port sprawling southwards because it’s too hard to consolidate the already-developed port industrial zone. Nowhere to put a feeder road into the port, clip-on proposals like the North Street overpass competing with brute force solutions like driving a four-lane highway down Evans Street. A funeral home that wants to shift to Recreation 2 from beneath an overpass that isn’t even going to be there. My suggestion is that the town planners are given a six-month sabbatical to tour provincial towns around the world and observe other people’s solutions to similar problems. When they come back they should be given greater authority, and should not have closed networks of entrepreneurs pushing their arms up their backs. This is a town in need of a new mission statement, a common agenda, a code of ethics, and a systems approach to a cohesive plan for its future. The Council are very helpful in providing information when one asks, but I believe a more public display of proposed projects would alleviate suspicion, and would help us all feel engaged in the process, and subsequently engender pride in our town.
The Tsunami discussion was raised by N. Leary who wrote in the Timaru Herald letters to the editor on 23rd November 2007: “It’s not if, but when, the big wave comes. How safe will the complex be? This on top of the Government stating during the year that no permits would be given for coastal development because of the chance of rising sea levels.” It would be useful to have a reference for that Government statement, and if anyone can find it we’d be much obliged.
Just trying to get a handle on what the risk at the site in question really is I went to the NIWA site and looked around. The most recent event of any significance appears to have been on the 18th November 2006: “wave heights recorded here in New Zealand were … 0.58 metres at Timaru” [link].
A wee footnote here, I found this: “Coastal urban planning needs to take sea level rise into account because its effects will be apparent during the typical replacement time of urban infrastructure such as buildings (before about 70 years). For local planning, ideally a risk assessment methodology may be employed to estimate the risk caused by sea level rise. In many locations, planning thresholds would also have to be considered in the light of possible changes in storm surge climatology due to changes in storm frequency and intensity, and (in some locations) changes to return periods of riverine flooding. In the medium term (decades), urban beaches will need beach re-nourishment and associated holding structures such as sea walls. Changes in storm and wave climatology are crucial factors for determining future coastal erosion.” (Walsh et al., 2004).
Walsh, K. Betts, H. et al (2004) “Using Sea Level Rise Projections for Urban Planning in Australia” Journal of Coastal Volume 20, Issue 2 (April 2004) pp. 586–598. [Online] Available from: here. (Accessed: 20th December 2007).
What is it with meat works that they always put them in choice places overlooking the ocean? Pukeuri, Pareora, Timaru. It took me some time to realise the answer, outfall pipes [1]. In Victorian times with frozen meat fetching twice the price in England than on the domestic market [2] focus was on industry, not the pretty view.
It is perhaps not surprising then that in such a young country pragmatic decisions are still valued over aesthetic ones, or that where town planners start to buy into aesthetics their eye is naive. I believe that computer generated plans and architects impressions tend to paint rosy pictures — drag and drop makes it too easy to create fantasies from your desktop. Architects work for clients for pay, so it is a natural mistake that they sometimes turn a bit of a blind eye on their code of ethics, and show what the client wants to see rather than what will actually be.
1. Golder Kingett Mitchell are consultants working in this area, a good starting place is their Stormwater Services page.
2. Solow, R (2007) The Nineteenth Century Heritage: Refrigeration And The Meat Industry. [Online] Available from: here (Accessed: 23rd November 2007).
3. Christchurch City Libraries (2005) The works of the Canterbury Frozen Meat Company at Belfast [picture, online] Available from: here (Accessed: 23rd November 2007).
Appropriate use, I imagine, is a function of the nature of the locality and the long-established use by people in the community. Entrepreneurial activity has a tendency to promote change, to over-ride the status quo, to be disruptive. Where the status quo is bad these changes may be for the better, but what happens when the status quo is good, and doesn’t either need or want change? The Regional Coastal Environment Plan for the Canterbury Region (2005) addresses these issues in Chapter 6: “Principal areas for commercial and recreational activities such as those involving port operation, marine farming, swing and pile moorings, boat launching and storage facilities are to be identified. The activities associated with such areas are to be protected from the adverse effects of other activities that could preclude the appropriate use of the areas or make their use inefficient.”
