Road repairs are underway in Hawke's Bay after Cyclone Gabrielle severely damaged the transport infrastructure. Photo: RNZ / Phil Pennington
The big job of repairing the roads and bridges comes with big decisions for central and local authorities - which ones get fixed first?
The work is not easy and it is not clean.
At Pakowhai, a handful of the 140 Downer staff across the Hawke's Bay region - all virtually now fully engaged on post-cyclone work - are grading and scraping a carapace of mud off the chipseal.
As the mud was drying in the 27 Celsius degree heat on Tuesday, it was giving off a fair bit of odour - and a lot more dust as trucks and cars churned along the long, straight, main Pakowhai Road.
Now reopened, it was busy and dustier than it has ever been.
Out on the side roads between the orchards, it was even noisier and even dustier.
A dirty yellow grader was making a heavy din, its blade pushing through and leaving behind it a dark brown twirl of mud hundreds of metres long and as high in places as your knees.
Rex Davies was on the grader, Derrick Theobald on the loader.
Derrick Theobald was on the loader, clearing up debris on the edges of the roads in Hawke's Bay after Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo: RNZ / Phil Pennington
"Just clearing up the edges of the roads and the roadsides for the public, yep, nah, it's going all right," Theobald said.
"He's a legend on the grader," said Theobald of Davies.
"Oh, I don't know about that, just doing my job," Davies came back.
A job that is requiring a lot of patience. Utes, some laden with pumps, or little yellow diggers, or endless rubbish, and a few cars, trundle up and down Allen Road, getting in the grader's way, from Pakowhai Road out to where the road doglegs up against the Tūtaekurī River stopbank.
Rex Davies was on the grader, helping smooth out Hawke's Bay road surfaces after Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo: RNZ / Phil Pennington
Andrew Tunoho, further up Allen Road, was on a big yellow digger, its big bucket down in the gloop, scraping it here and there gently, so as not to damage the seal.
"Just gotta be careful, working under those wires with a digger this size, gotta be careful," Tunoho said.
Oliver Postings can drive a digger - but not like that.
"I could drive one but I wouldn't put me in charge of one," said the Hawke's Bay manager of Downer.
"The last thing you want to do is rip the road up while he's cleaning the silt," Postings said.
"So there's some skill to just moving enough mud to make it safe to drive on but not ripping the road up so it falls apart when it rains next."
Care for the road is requiring care for the people, with Postings' major theme being managing fatigue.
Also, exposure to the foul dust is a problem on what may now be New Zealand's dustiest worksite.
Despite the difficulties, Postings said they had managed to clear most of the side roads, maybe 10km all up towards the stopbanks.
Drains, too, the unsung heroes supporting roads, needed clearing of wood, roofing steel, apple trees, and the odd living room settee carried there by floodwaters that, going by the evidence left on the roadside hedges, and damage to ceilings inside the houses, topped 2.5 metres.
Tricky priorities
Work on the hard-hit State Highway 5 through Esk Valley in Hawke’s Bay. Photo: Supplied / NZTA
Before the side roads were worked on, the main road and other arterials were the priorities.
The trickier priorities looming ahead are the number of destroyed bridges further out of town.
"There's been aerial surveillance to assess them but some of them are difficult to get to, apart from the ones in the urban areas where we can see that impact," Postings said.
"We've got to clear the road to be able to get to where the previous bridge was.
"We've got to assess the approaches and make sure that you can actually rest the Bailey bridge on solid ground on either side."
Because Waka Kotahi owns the country's stocks of Bailey bridge parts, it was now a central government choice of where to put them first.
"I believe that the first priority is Tiniroto [near Wairoa] and Rissington [northwest of Napier] but I don't have that confirmed," said the Downer manager.
"As soon as we get there, we'll be straight into it."
Twirls of graded mud, scraped sideways in Hawke's Bay on the roads. Photo: RNZ / Phil Pennington
On the local roads, councils set the priorities - with a lot of input from the likes of Downer. A small council such as Tararua district, has no choice, when it has 50 roads to fix.
Contractors busy before were "even busier" now, Postings said.
"But this is our focus, we'll put stuff on hold that's not important at the moment and focus on delivering this task."
If they could not get resources locally, they would go outside the region and pull in people - or gear.
"There's particular types of small dump trucks that we've had to bring in. There weren't any in Hawke's Bay," Postings said.
"So we've pretty much gone to one of our suppliers, who's taken it off the shop floor and brought it up here to help at the Transpower site - and that was one phone call," he said.
"It was shiny and new. It's not so shiny and new now."
