‘Many, many months’ of recovery ahead for one of Hawke’s Bay’s largest employers

The magnitude of decimation at one of Hawke’s Bay’s largest employers is huge, but appears matched by the staff’s determination to get things up and running again.

It’s been three weeks to the day since a stopbank protecting the Pan Pac forestry processing plant near Napier was overtopped, leading to the entire area becoming overwhelmed by 2m of water from the Esk River.

The loss, in terms of plant, buildings, vehicles, machinery and product, is enormous.

There are two questions the plant’s managing director Tony Clifford gets asked a lot. One, is ‘how much is all this going to cost?’ The other is ‘when you be back up and running again’?.

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The answer to the former, he says, “will be more than $10 million, but less than $100m”. And the answer to the second is “not weeks, but not years either”.

The company is critical to the region’s economy. About 400 people work at the site. A further 400 work as contractors in the company’s forestry operations.

A recent BERL report said something like $1 out of every $16 generated in Hawke’s Bay comes from this company, which is owned by the Japanese-based Oji Group.

It’s the largest forestry grower in Hawke’s Bay with more than 80 per cent of its trees planted on iwi-owned land.

Only in recent days have vast silt-covered expanses of the plant emerged from contaminated surface water. And now, just as every other affected landowner in the region is discovering, silt is proving to be a bane of daily existence.

Clifford said staff had been eager to help clean the site and the place was humming with machinery and teams of workers removing tracts of silt.

“By far the biggest issue we’re dealing with at the moment is the amount of silt on the site. We’ve been working on that for two weeks now, and I’d say we’re probably only halfway through the job,” he said.

The next big task will be to assess production equipment.

“A lot of that, particularly the electrical systems and the control systems all had more than 2m of water over them. That is probably the most significant item of damage, and it will take many, many months to recover that,” Clifford said.

The company had engaged a Singapore-based flood recovery company which went into plants such as Pan Pac “with specialist teams of people, equipment and chemicals they use to help recover electrical distribution and control equipment”.

They would be on site later this month working alongside Pan Pac staff, Clifford said.

He would have a better idea of when the plant might be operational in a few weeks after an engineering assessment had been undertaken.

For now, Clifford and his staff were focussed on moving on.

“We’ll be back. Our property and business have been decimated, but no-one died, and we certainly recognise and acknowledge the loss of life that others suffered,” he said.