NZ Engine

Source: Radio New Zealand

An urban renewal project in New Plymouth’s CBD is revealing traces of the city’s past – piece by piece.

The derelict Metro Plaza is being demolished to allow a stretch of the Huatoki Stream – which has been hidden from view for about a century – to be uncovered.

The Devon Street address has been home to a multitude of businesses over the years including a bakery, drapery, tearooms, and furniture store before in more recent years hosting a cafe, night club and even a Subway outlet.

Senior project manager Steve Ilkovics said the May and Arrowsmith bakery was the earliest to leave its mark.

“The bakehouse was the first building on this site probably built about 1908 or 1910 and there’s some interesting history around how it linked up with some of the old flour mills and the mill building across the way at Powderham Street.

“Potentially it had the capacity to bake all the bread Taranaki needed back in those days.”

An article published when the bakehouse opened in 1918 by the Taranaki Daily News proclaimed it “would be hard to find its equal among the bakehouses of the Dominion”.

The top floor held up to 305 tonnes of flour, which was fed through to two large hoppers to mixing machines on the second floor, where the dough was fed down to the ground floor where there were “five big ovens, each capable of holding 480 to 500 loaves”.

About “9000 dozen eggs” could be stored in the cellar and a concrete platform was specially constructed on the ground floor for breaking the vast quantities needed each day.

Ilkovics said experts had been bought in to examine the wooden beams which held up the three-storey bakehouse.

“They identified this wood as being Oregon pine, know as Douglas Fir here in New Zealand as well.

“These are 14m-long beams, which are probably from the heart of the tree, but interestingly we didn’t start growing Douglas Fir in New Zealand until around about the 1870s or 1880s, so we can only assume these were imported from the United States.”

New Plymouth District Council intends to repurpose the beams as street furniture, decking, handrails and other public‑space features.

Demolition manager Brett Wheeler, of Wheeler Demolition, said the job had not been without its challenges.

“Probably managing the stream, the awa looking after that has been toughest. If it was a different kind of demo we would’ve just caved all this in and loaded it out.

“But the methodology of this one had to be cut and carry because we can’t put too much weight on certain parts of the floor especially at the front where it’s all timber framing, so we’ve had to crane diggers into certain points.”

His crew had made several surprising finds.

“So a good one’s just down here. We pulled one of the walls away and the foundation for this building, we’re standing on, is like a pretty old bluestone masonry wall, which is pretty cool.

“No one knew it was there until we ripped down three layers of walls and found it.”

Ilkovics had a theory about that wall.

“The blockwork that you can see under the old wooden building there. We believe that is part of the old railway embankment.

“A trainline used to run through this site, along this edge, and that was the original Waitara to New Plymouth line.

“This section was made redundant when the line was diverted along the coast, but a lot of the old brickwork, stonework was just sort of left in place.”

Ilkovics, who said it was a privilege to work on such a project, said another find was the steel framing of a drapery that once occupied the site.

“This beam on the ground here was part of the old McGruer’s building, which was constructed in the 1930s, again we didn’t know much about it until we peeled back the cladding.

“We found it was an import and you can actually see here from the stamp that it’s come from a company called Dorman Long & Co in Middlesbrough, England which still fabricates steel components and exports them around the world today.”

The company famously supplied steel for both the Auckland and Sydney harbour bridges.

The New Plymouth District Council had partnered with property developer K.D. Holdings and Ngāti Te Whiti to create the Huatoki public space which is part of its $10 million centre city strategy.​

Construction of the wider project – which included new retail, office, and hospitality spaces on both sides of the stream, was due to begin next year

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Air New Zealand has cut 5 percent of flights and will start to consolidate other routes after the July school holidays, chief executive Nikhil Ravishankar says.

It comes as the airline is expecting a full-year pre-tax loss of between $340 and $390 million due to the soaring cost of jet fuel.

Talking to Checkpoint on Thursday, Ravishankar said domestic demand was already soft before the war in Iran, and the crisis had only made it more acute.

“Cost-of-living challenges are real and so where we’ve gone in with price increases, we are starting to see the fact that we are getting to the limits of certain markets and the ability to absorb those costs.

“So, we’re being very thoughtful about what we do with price increases.”

He said the airline was eyeing up further cuts to flights after the July school holidays.

Air New Zealand had already cut 5 percent of its flights in response to the war, which had triggered “genuinely unprecedented” fuel prices but ruled out a request for financial assistance from the government.

“We are paying over double what we normally pay for fuel. Recovery will have a long tail. But it all depends on when the conflict will end and how the fuel price recovers.”

Ravishankar said reducing the frequency of flights, not routes, was the goal – for example instead of flying twice daily between destinations, the airline might fly once.

“That’s by-and-large frequency cuts, so we’re cutting flights that are middle of the day, non-peak flying.”

Ravishankar said it was yet to be finalised which flights would be lost, but the airline was targeting long-haul, international routes between August and October.

He said there would be fewer cuts on regional and domestic routes and expected customers would be advised in June.

Ravishankar said the sharemarket had been informed Air NZ would preserve all costs associated with supporting customers.

He said the first priority was to ensure the airline continued operating a safe, punctual, and reliable service at an affordable price.

“There are a lot of costs that go into running 500 flights a day… so those costs, we’re making sure that they are right, but we’re protecting that.

“But what we’re also doing is going through every single line item in the business and making sure any of the costs that we can live without for now – as we’re dealing with the crisis, that we… remove those costs from the business.”

Ravishankar said despite the difficulties the airline was facing, he loved his job and the role was a privilege.

“This is one hell of an airline. It’s one of the great New Zealand iconic brands, and even today one of the most respected airlines in the world.

“The plans that we have in place ensure New Zealand has a world-class airline into the future.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

National grid operator Transpower will not be prosecuted after all over the toppling of a pylon that cut power to about 90,000 homes and businesses across Northland.

The Electricity Authority lodged a formal complaint against Transpower last year, alleging the state-owned company had breached the Electricity Industry Participation Code by not maintaining its assets in line with best industry practice.

The pylon, at Glorit, north of Auckland, fell over during routine maintenance in June 2024 after contractors removed the nuts from three of its legs at once.

Transpower could have been fined up to $2 million if a breach had been proven.

However, on Thursday the Electricity Authority said Transpower had since provided new evidence, and an international expert had found Transpower met the required standards.

As a result, the Electricity Authority had dropped its complaint – but it was now considering whether the standards needed to be changed, or whether a different approach was needed to “reflect New Zealand’s specific circumstances”.

In particular, the current code did not apply to outside contractors, such as the French-owned company Omexom, which was working on the pylon at the time.

The authority said it was “considering whether the concept of good electricity industry practice is fit for purpose, including in circumstances where industry participants may contract out significant parts of their functions”.

Meanwhile, Transpower welcomed the authority’s decision to drop the complaint.

Executive general manager grid delivery Mark Ryall said it confirmed the company’s position that its processes and systems were “consistent with good industry practice”.

“An independent report found the tower fall was caused by a crew working for our service provider failing to follow approved processes and procedures. It also highlighted that, despite strong systems and oversight, human error can still occur.”

Ryall said the tower fall should never have happened, and apologised for the impact on people and businesses in Northland.

Since then Transpower had strengthened its oversight of service providers, to make sure their practices were robust and their crews had the correct skills and training.

“We continue to work hard with our service providers to improve our practices to ensure that we can prevent an incident like this happening again,” Ryall said.

A report ordered by then Energy Minister Simeon Brown shortly after the accident made 26 recommendations for Transpower, Omexom, the Electricity Authority and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.

All 19 recommendations for Transpower have since been carried out.

In November last year Sydney-based law firm Piper Alderman started class action against Transpower and Omexom on behalf of the roughly 20,000 businesses affected by the outage.

The firm did not specify how much money it was seeking, but economic consultants Infometrics estimated businesses had lost $60 million as a result of the power cut while the Northland Chamber of Commerce put the figure at $80m.

In the months after the collapse, Northland’s Chamber of Commerce and local MP Grant McCallum pushed hard for compensation from Transpower and Omexom.

Eventually, the companies agreed to give $500,000 each to a “resilience fund” supporting projects with long-term benefits for Northland.

About 180,000 people were affected by the outage.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand