What happens when the water rises in Auckland

After writing my blog on New Orleans yesterday, I reflected on our own position. I live on Auckland’s North Shore and when I drive the motorway to the Auckland Harbour Bridge and there is a king tide, the water almost laps onto the verge of the motorway. If the sea rises a metre, the water would frequently run accross the motorway itself. If that rise becomes permanent, Auckland, we have a problem.

Auckland is a problem to me because I live there, but the same applies to areas such as the main entrance into Wellington where a whole stretch of road runs along a coast which frequently has heavy seas. Only recently State Highway One was closed because of waves crashing on the shore near Paekakariki in one of the storms which have now become commonplace in New Zealand.

New Zealand is an island nation, surrounded by sea. Much of it is well above sea level, but many areas are not that high at all. In fact, with our passion for the sea, a large percentage of our population lives close to the sea.

We watch with interest as the Pacific Island nations start to consider the possibility of having to leave their ancestral homes. We have even started planning to take on refugees from the Islands when some of them are forced to evacuate, most likely forever, but I see very little evidence of preparations for the seemingly inevitable, when the sea encroaches on our roads and homes. How is it that we seem to have so little forsight? What are the government, Transit and the councils doing to make sure that we are able to continue life as usual when the ice shelfs drop and the polar ice is gone?

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

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Red Light Cameras in Auckland

Just a quick comment. I get so angry at the many people who run the red lights. We see and read so many stories about accidents involving innocent people who have the misfortune to be in the right place at the wrong time with people who seem to be in a real hurry to get to the hospital.

Auckland City who previously said that red light cameras were too expensive, have decided to install them after doing some surveys with safety cameras finding that the numbers of people doing this are in the thousands each day. I hope other cities including North Shore follow suit especially at busy intersections like Tristram Ave.

Offenders will pay a $150 instant fine and there are suggestions of giving them demerit points as well, which I would be fine with. Something needs to be done to stop them and there is no good reason for anyone to risk their and others safety in this way. So often I sit behind someone who runs the red and then when all the lights have cycled, I drive through and end up sitting behind them at the next set of lights.

TV3 did a good job of producing a news video and obviously didn’t have to wait long to prove the point.

I’d like them to introduce a program like the old dob in a smokey, reporting cars spewing smoke from their exhausts, so we can all police this problem. They tried this for a short time last year and it worked well, wish they would do it again.

Judder bars slow down traffic

The road I live on is fairly narrow and is often used as a shortcut from one suburb to the next. Boy racers like to race up the road to the intersection where my house is situated on a corner site, testing out their turbo’s. A few years ago I joined fellow residents in the street and called for a council meeting to do something about it. We asked for a couple of chicanes with side barriers, basically barriers that run at an angle to the road and force people to slow down to navigate around them. But no, North Shore City council decided to put in fairly long judder bars, that is they go up and the road rises for a bit over a car width and then they go down again.

Now 2 things happen, the first is that people coming from the intersection go reasonably slowly over the judder and then plant it going down the hill. The main casualties are pets, although there are accidents from time to time as they get to the first corner and meet someone coming the other way.

The other thing is people come racing up the road and either don’t notice the judder bar or forget it is there until they have hit it at speed, which is pretty silly because it is right before a T junction. Every night we hear the scrapes of car underbellies as their cars get gravel rash and houses on both sides of the road are showing cracks from the impact, although council denies that this is possible.

Last night at 4:30 AM I heard one of these crashes followed by some clattering. It was pretty loud and I jumped out of bed and raced to the windows to see if there had in fact been an accident. I didn’t see anything and went back to bed. This morning, I got a call to say come and have a look on the corner and you can see on the photo what I found. A rubbish truck had managed to fkip itself and land between 2 trees after knocking down a couple of signs. I hope the driver was ok.

It’s pretty obvious what happened. He must have been coming up the road way too fast, didn’t see the judder bar which would have been like a ramp for motor stunts. He would have been airborn on an angle as he realised there was a corner coming, started to turn just before he hit the air, landed on 2 or 3 wheels , overcorrected and flipped.

If we had the chicane we asked for, there may have been some damage to the truck, although only a fraction of what there was as you can see from the photo and the main damage would have been to the driver’s pride. But then I’m not a traffic engineer, I’m just using a little common sense.

Finally the staff in the Waitemama Health Board speak out

As a footnote on my story yesterday, in this morning’s New Zealand Herald, senior doctors have finally spoken out, to the ‘disappointment’ of the Waitemata Health Board. I’ll bet they were disappointed. The Health Board say they have been working on it as fast as they can. But didn’t they close a whole floor of the hospital because they had insufficient staff? Now they are going to open a new ward.

At least it is now out in the open and we won’t hear any more stories of “It’s not usually this bad”, because we all know it is. The sad thing is that for the next few weeks at least, the newspapers, the woman’s magazines, TV and more are going to be full of sad stories about people who died because they couldn’t get their chemo or radiation treatments in time and now their cancers are invasive. We’ll hear about elderly people who didn’t make their 50th wedding anniversary because they didn’t get satisfactory care in time. I’ll put money on it that the Auckland and especially local nwespapers are going to be full of letters to the editor and many will be followed up as sad, sad stories.

The board will say “It’s not our fault, the government wouldn’t give us enough money.” The senior doctors, registrars and nurses will all be saying, “We told you over and over again, but all you cared about was budgets and efficiency.”

I have no problem with hospitals being run as a business, with controlled budgets and business plans, but let’s never forget what they are there for.

I do have one question though, and I wish my WordPress had a poll function, but then I doubt they would answer this question. Either way, here it is. To those people who work in our public hospitals. If you need surgery or have a serious medical condition, do you go to your public hospital, or do you go private? Why?

Sadly I am confident that for the majority, I already know the answer.

Again to those of you who work as staff in the hospitals, thank you so much for staying and not going oversees where you can earn at least twice as much money and in many cases function in a technological environment where most patients get their own drugs and not someone elses, where their files about their condition and allergies are available on demand and where far fewer people needlessly lose their lives. It must be very tempting sometimes to long for single shifts and an organisation that cares as much for their patients as they for saving money.

Now let the stories begin. I don’t want to sound cynical, at least any more than I already am, but it is election year this year isn’t it? There had better be some funds coming up for Auckland hospitals because health care is going to become an election issue.