Council wallah out for drive gets his boots muddy.

Far North mayor John Carter went to check the slips on Friday morning and thought they looked bad

Like as if the on-site contractors who have to clean up the need more council and NZTA wallahs in hi-viz lurking at their job-site for the next year.  Yes, on SH1 there's another large underslip, 15x overslips, the Mangamuka Gorge is going to be closed again. Possibly forever.  

I'm sure a drone snapshot of the road / flyover of the slips would be of more use.  That only needs one person on site.  Hell, the Mayor might even get such footage posted on the council website to show what state the road is actually in.  And a regularly updated timeline showing progress during the repair.

After all we live in the Wuhan pox days of Zoomed calls and unwanted co-governance with a dose of 3-waters driven government holding pre-meetings online over doomed MP's.

Maybe the same council website might have some real-time information on all slips and outages around the district for long-suffering ratepayers who pay his over-blown wages.  At present such info is found out via word-of-mouth.  And if you do not have access to Fakebook via their closed local information groups, you're stuffed for info during such events.

When I drove the same highway a couple of weeks ago, the road was noticeably slumping in multiple places, with large 750+ mm slumps visible, just waiting for a small rain event such as we're enduring right now.  And this is only 200mm over a couple of days, not your typical cyclonic normality of 100mm an hour over 3-5 days.  Meanwhile both SH1 and SH10 have flooded access further south and are often blocked.

It is high time the same governmental wallahs made real efforts to future proof road access to the Far North.  A tunnel would be nice, a decent road even better!  We're only talking about a 400m high hill!

The Mayor shouldn't need to get his gumboots muddy!