Blenheim café patrons drain away due to flooded boardwalk

Flooding on Blenheim’s popular Taylor River walkway cannot be cleared during whitebait spawning season, leaving a nearby restaurateur out of pocket.

The boardwalk and amphitheatre at The Quays, popular with walkers and cyclists, are still submerged weeks after the last heavy rainfall.

Sonu Karwal, manager at Raupō Café and Restaurant, said the flooding was affecting his business because recreational users of the pathway were some of his regular customers.

“Usually we get groups of bikers every Monday and Friday, but they can’t bike on the track because it’s flooded, so we’re losing customers,” Karwal said.

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“Every Saturday morning we get the park runners and there’s 40 or 50 people coming for coffee, tea and breakfast.

“So if we’re losing that amount of people every Saturday morning, we’re losing hundreds of dollars’ worth of business, because even if they just have a coffee and cake, that’s $10 each.”

The same issue occurred around the same time last year, and Karwal said the Marlborough District Council (MDC) should have done more to prevent it happening again.

“We’ve told the council so many times about it, but look at this again,” he said pointing to the floodwaters.

“They should use the cutter and get it cleared, but they said it was whitebait season, so they couldn’t do it now.

”If they were so bothered about the whitebait season they could’ve done it earlier. They should have done it earlier,” he said.

Andy White, Marlborough District Council’s rivers and drainage engineering manager, said he and his team were prohibited from clearing away the silt between February 1 and April 30 as this was the fish spawning season.

While last year’s issues were largely due to uncut aquatic weeds, this year’s problems were also affected by high levels of sediment build-up along the riverbed, following last winter’s weather events.

“We’ve had these huge storm events recently, and they deposit a lot of silt into the river and therefore the riverbed levels get quite high as well,” White said.

“When we did the weed-cutting operation in January, the boat actually got up to a point where it could no longer get past the pile.

“The silt’s actually built up to a point where we can’t actually get right up under the restaurant (Raupō) and that only became apparent in January during that weed cut.”

White said his team would begin removing the silt and excess weeds from the river once the whitebait spawning season ended on May 1.

However, Karwal said the prospect of the area staying flooded for several more weeks didn’t bode well for his business and he was not entitled to any form of compensation.