CEO of Rakiraki town says 5000 in centres, market gone

Transcript

The Chief Executive Officer of the Rakiraki Town Council says his focus is on cleaning up his town so that people can come in and buy supplies, while there are more than 5,000 people still in evacuation centres.

Rakesh Chandra says the town market is completely destroyed and while many need shelter, he is counting on the Government to provide that, while he is focused on the massive clean up job.

He spoke to Alex Perrottet in Rakiraki.

RAKESH CHANDRA: There's two things here, right, number one there is a rural set-up, that's outside my town.  And I'm looking after the town area, my CBD and my town boundary.  And within my town boundary, currently my market is completely demolished, I don't have any market structure. All my other structures and properties for around council are all damaged completely.  Our clean-up has already begun, we have our heavy machinery doing all the clean-up, removing all the debris, all the trees, and all the damaged construction materials and they're all going to our dump site. Apart from that we have managed through water authority to restore water, but only on narration basis. In the electric city, no, I don't think so, that will be up and running in two weeks or months. So that is out of the question. But to what we are at the moment, our first priority is to let the town open.  So that business houses, do their clean-up and start their businesses.  Because there's people out there who want to come to town and buy things.  Especially groceries, goods, hardware items, so I need to look after the safety and security of those people. So that is what we are doing at the moment. Our second priority will be going down to our residents and cleaning up streets, roads, all their rubbish that they have, we have to pile up and take it to the dump. And then we'll coordinate with other agencies, so that we can get all our infrastructures up to date. So basically that is it.

ALEX PERROTTET: I spoke to people in town and one lady said, she's coming up here because she's got grandchildren, they've got no walls or roof on their house and they want tarpaulins, how soon will you be able to get hold of that sort of stuff for people's shelters?

RC: Ok, for that part the government is doing a lot, I think they have some plans already set-up.  We have not been told yet.  But from our side here from Rakiraki we cannot do much about that. All we can do is provide them with evacuation centres, all our evacuation centres are open and are pretty jammed up, so it's overcrowded evacuation centres.  I'm looking at around close to 5-6,000 people in the evacuation centres.