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Source: Radio New Zealand

A dead possum in the Roxburgh reservoir has triggered a boil water notice for the area.

The Central Otago District Council (CODC) said the possum was found during an unrelated inspection on Wednesday, and it’s not known how long it’s been in the water.

It has since issued a boil water notice for Roxburgh and the Lake Roxburgh Village, which would remain in place until the network had been flushed.

CODC said three times a week sampling hadn’t indicated degraded water quality, and a full investigation was underway to find out how the possum got inside the reservoir.

It said the reservoir which would remain isolated until it had been fully disinfected and any possum entry points addressed.

CODC’s Julie Muir said the notice could be lifted as early as Thursday.

Two water tankers would be available at Roxburgh School and Lake Roxburgh Village Hall on Wednesday evening.

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

Source: Radio New Zealand

A child is in hospital after being hit by a bus while bike riding in Auckland.

Emergency services were called to the crash on Te Atatu Road around 6.30pm on Wednesday.

Police said officers responded to reports of a vehicle versus a cyclist on Te Atatu Peninsula, while Hato Hone St John dispatched one ambulance and a critical care unit.

A spokesperson for St John said one patient with moderate injuries was taken to hospital.

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

Source: Radio New Zealand

Recent severe storms have triggered more than 11,000 slips on the East Cape, according to satellite imagery.

Heavy rainfall caused widespread damage and flooding in parts of the North Island in January, with Te Araroa and Hicks Bay some of the hardest hit areas on the east coast.

The communities remain isolated from one another, with multiple landslides blocking State Highway 35, which remains shut to the public between Pōtaka and Te Araroa.

The Transport Agency said the ground was still moving, and further slips have been reported over the weekend near a large landslide at Punaruku – estimated to be 250,000 cubic metres.

Dragonfly Data Science said its before-and-after satellite imagery of the East Cape revealed the scale of the devastation, with comparisons providing a large-scale snapshot of where the land had moved.

It identified more than 11,000 landslips and silt damage covering 900 hectares.

The Wellington-based company said the recent storm caused significant, but concentrated destruction along the coastal northern end of the East Cape.

Dragonfly’s director Finlay Thompson said the map clearly illustrated what happened.

“It provides a birds-eye view of the area following an intense and highly localised storm event such as this, and offers an effective way of assessing how widespread and severe the damage is.”

The company developed a similar map following Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023, and Thompson believed such tools were crucial for understanding the “true scale” of such disasters.

He said these types of storms highlighted the gap between disaster response and long-term climate preparedness, and said better tools were needed to plan ahead.

“While this map isn’t a predictive tool on its own, it is an important first step. By linking storm impacts with rainfall and terrain data over multiple events, we could begin to build models that help predict where slips and flooding are most likely to occur in future.

“People’s livelihoods are at stake. While response and recovery efforts are critical and effective, the reality is that communities are living through significant disruption and loss in the meantime – and that’s something we can’t afford to treat as normal.”

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

Source: Radio New Zealand

A deadly crash involving a car and a school bus has devastated the town of Wairoa, says the local mayor.

The crash – at about 3pm on Tuesday – closed the intersection of Black Street and Archilles Street on State Highway 2.

Only minor injuries were reported from the driver and two passengers on the bus.

But a person in the car was killed, and two others critically injured.

Mayor Craig Little believed the people in the car were all from the same family.

“Wairoa’s a pretty unique place, we all get on, we all know each other,” he said.

“The families probably all know each other who have been involved, the first responders, my hat goes off to them, they would have come across something horrendous.

“The town was really quite sad yesterday and probably still is,” he said.

Police say the death will be referred to the coroner and that they would continue to investigate.

The mayor said that in itself would be a horrible job.

“No-one wanted this on anybody,” he said.

Little had been speaking with relatives who were struggling to cope.

“I don’t think they are, simple as that, you just will never ever get over something like this,” he said.

“Everyone is grieving, really.”

The Ministry of Education said it had engaged a traumatic incident team to work with the school that had its students on the bus.

“This support will be available for as long as it’s needed,” it said.

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Source: Radio New Zealand

Life is returning to a Far North bay once compared to an underwater desert, eight years after local hapū declared a fishing ban that makes up for its lack of legal clout with tikanga and staunch local support.

A no-take rāhui was declared at Maitai Bay in December 2017, covering the popular cove on the Karikari Peninsula and most of neighbouring Waikato Bay.

Annual monitoring since then has shown growing variety, numbers and size of fish, with a seven-fold increase in snapper leading the resurgence. In the past few years, crayfish have also started to reappear.

Te Rangi-i-Taiāwhiaotia Trust chairwoman Kataraina “Kui” Rhind said alarm about the state of the bay came to a head around 2014.

“We had a couple of whānau who’d spent their lives swimming in this bay and started realising there was absolutely no sea life left in here. It had become a kina barren.”

Rhind said over many decades all the bay’s big crayfish and snapper had been fished out, leaving the kina, or sea urchins, with no natural predators.

As kina numbers exploded, the creatures ate every last bit of kelp, leaving reef fish with nowhere to live.

The result was a kina barren, or bare rock populated only by hungry kina.

Rhind said local hapū Te Whānau Moana and Te Rorohuri held a series of hui to discuss what could be done.

At first, locals considered calling on the Ministry of Primary Industries to protect the bay, with an official marine reserve for example, but they soon had second thoughts.

“We had a vision ourselves of what we wanted to achieve and it didn’t include being told what we can and can’t do by MPI. So we decided we’d carry on by ourselves. We don’t have the law, but we have tikanga.”

That meant the no-take rāhui could not be enforced by way of warnings, fines or prosecutions.

However, Rhind said signs had been put up in prominent locations around the bay, pamphlets were handed out to campers, and locals kept an eye on the water.

A gate to neighbouring Waikato Bay, used in the past for launching boats, had been locked by the land owner over separate concerns about vehicles hooning on the beach.

Rhind said it was hard for would-be fishers to escape the sharp eyes of local kids.

“We’ve got our children, all our mokos, along the beach, and if they see anybody fishing they say, ‘Hey, we got a rāhui in here’. And sometimes these people say, ‘It doesn’t matter, we’re taking’. That’s really sad for our mokos. We’re trying to teach them how to rejuvenate, how to restore this place. And then you’ve got arrogant people who just think they’ve got the given right to take whatever they want.”

The hapū took an “education over enforcement” approach, explaining to would-be fishers why the rāhui was in place rather than trying to physically stop them.

Despite some setbacks, Rhind said most visitors and locals backed the rāhui.

“I would go as far as saying 95 percent of the community totally support this kaupapa. They love the fact that they can come to the beach and go for a dive and see fish. Fish come up to them and are nearly kissing them.”

Rhind said people had started comparing Maitai Bay to Goat Island, a long-standing marine reserve at Leigh, north of Auckland.

“There was nothing here, but as the years progress with the rāhui it’s changing. What’s happening is immense.”

That was confirmed by diver Rhys Spilling, who said he had been coming to Maitai Bay since he was a boy.

Now living at nearby Rangiputa, he had seen big changes since the rāhui came into effect.

“The main thing I’ve noticed is the fish aren’t scared of you at all. They’re fine just swimming next to you, and that’s pretty cool. And there’s also much bigger numbers, much bigger fish as well.”

Diver Sofia Koch, from Mount Maunganui, was bubbling with excitement as she emerged from the bay.

“We saw lots of really friendly snapper. You could pretty much touch them by hand which is really cute. You can pat them. We saw moray eels, octopus, a little jellyfish, an eagle ray, and some really colourful fish.”

Koch fully supported the no-take rāhui.

“Like all the animals, they sometimes need protecting. We take so much. I think it’s a good thing.”

Samara Nicholas, founder of Mountains to Sea Conservation Trust, started taking school groups snorkelling at Maitai Bay in the early 2000s, as part of the trust’s Experiencing Marine Reserves programme.

There they would see the bay’s near-lifeless kina barrens before heading to Goat Island, so they could compare it with a healthy marine ecosystem.

“So the kids were able to see the difference, and they were completely blown away by all the fish they could see at Goat Island.

And one of the hapū members approached me and said, ‘It’d be great to do something like this, you know, not a marine reserve, but we’d like to make a no-take area under traditional authority”.

Nicholas said the role of the trust since then had been to help the hapū set up their own trust and achieve their aspirations.

Mountains to Sea Conservation Trust also provided training for local rangatahi [youth] so they could help monitor marine life in the bay.

Nicholas said the changes since 2017 meant Far North schoolchildren could now see a thriving underwater environment without having to travel all the way to Goat Island.

“This is really about restoring the balance and restoring our underwater forests by protecting these predators that eat the kina, then the kelp forest can recover. And that makes much more habitat for reef fish that we’re now seeing. The end goal is that there is more fish for the community to harvest in the future as well.”

Nicholas said the Maitai Bay no-take rāhui had been a success because of its simplicity – some marine protection attempts had been overly complicated, with different rules for different species or types of fishing.

Ecologist Vince Kerr, of Whangārei, said he had led monitoring of Maitai Bay, on behalf of the hapū, since 2018.

During the past four years in particular he had observed increasing fish numbers across all age classes.

“That trend is the really important part. It means restoration is underway, and it’s significant. It’s not just a one-off blip in snapper numbers.”

He had been concerned by the absence of crayfish for the first five to six years but they, too, were starting to return.

“Snapper and crayfish are really the keystone predators that control the joint. They dictate what happens, because they’re the ones that control kina as the primary grazer. So their role is super-important.”

His most recent report described 2025 as “a turning point” with snapper biomass now seven times higher than in 2017.

Kerr said it was reasonable to expect that trend would continue until the Maitai Bay figures were comparable to, or even higher than, those at Goat Island, due to habitat quality in and around Maitai Bay.

However, Kerr said populations of reef fish such as red moki and butterfish remained low, suggesting the kelp forests would need to regrow before they returned.

Rhind said the rāhui was originally supposed to remain in place only until 2020 but the hapū soon realised that “didn’t even touch the sides”.

It was then extended to 2025, and had since been extended indefinitely.

Rhind said restoration efforts had stepped up in the past year with volunteer divers now culling kina, giving kelp forests a chance to regenerate.

The trust was also planning to build a matauranga pokapu, or education centre, for use by school groups and researchers. It would include a classroom, lab, museum and kitchen.

Rhind said the trust had held initial discussions with a major funding provider and hoped to open the centre in early 2028.

Long-term, she hoped the bay would act as a fish nursery for the surrounding area, repopulating waters right around the Karikari Peninsula.

Her dream was one of abundance, both for marine life and for future generations to be able to take the food they needed.

“If we do well within the bay, that will feed out all around the peninsula. You can’t ask for anything better than that, eh?”

Hapū member and keen diver Whetu Rutene was a key driver of the rāhui in 2017.

At the time he said concerns about declining fish numbers were not new, but the rapid spread of kina barrens gave the rāhui urgency.

He said Maitai Bay was not the only place in Northland with kina barrens but it was ideal for a rāhui because it was sheltered with water depth ranging from 1 metre to almost 100m, and it could be easily monitored.

Reaction to the rāhui had been for the most part ”very respectful”.

Before the rāhui, he saw spearfishers and kayak fishers in the bay almost every day, but within a month there were almost none.

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Source: Radio New Zealand

A much-loved and long-running Auckland secondhand bookshop will live to write another chapter, having saved itself from closure.

Hard to Find Books was struggling to find a new location for its hundreds of thousands of titles after its landlord – the Catholic Church – decided to sell the famous former convent where the shop has traded for eight years.

Following months of hunting the shop has finally found a home, but as other secondhand bookshops close their doors it’s still facing a tough fight for survival.

After spending the past five months lugging hundreds of heavy boxes and sliding thousands of books on to the new shop’s shelves it is hard to believe that Warwick Jordan still wants to buy more.

It’s lucky, then, that Hard to Find’s new location is only a hop across the road, tucked away in the basement of Auckland’s vinyl haven – Southbound records – in Eden Terrace.

“If we don’t buy them who will? There’s less and less second hand bookshops out there and the ones that are out there, a lot of them aren’t buying at the moment because things are really hard. But I’m obsessive I’ll just keep going into debt or whatever and carry on.”

The huge new basement space can house about 250,000 books allowing Jordan to empty out shipping containers full of titles he couldn’t display at the current shop.

But despite its size, Jordan worries it will not be the same as the grand, 120-year-old convent provided by Catholic church eight years ago in what he hailed as a ‘miracle’ – when the shop left its Onehunga location due to steep rent rises.

“It’s got so much character and it’s got history. There’s the confessional which is the children’

s room, there’s little fittings in the walls where the nuns would get holy water before they’d go in for communion in the chapel. Just sort of the vibe of the place, it’s just a beautiful, amazing building.”

Despite the new space lacking these character features, Jordan is thankful to have somewhere to house his passion.

He said without the support built over the shop’s 43 years he was not sure it could have survived the uncertain times.

“I did debate about do I just take this as a hint of shut up and go away, but there was so many people who didn’t want us to close down. I mean there’s hardly any secondhand bookshops left, and we are a dinosaur and I know it’s not a very sensible economic model and all the rest of it, but I decided the amount of community support was kind of such that I’ve got to keep going.”

In the past three years two of Auckland’s longest-standing secondhand bookshops have closed their doors.

In 2023, Herne Bay’s Dominion books shut down after 37 years when new landlords put up the rent.

Jason Books, in the city centre, closed after 55 years at the end of 2024.

Rachel Lynch – the manager of the Open Book, an oasis of pre-loved novels in Ponsonby – agreed that running a secondhand bookshop is hard work.

“It’s not easy, I mean just straight up money is difficult, we try and pay our staff fairly and foot traffic especially in this particular part is quite difficult, especially on those poor weather days the money is just not there at all.”

Lynch said it was lucky to have generous owners.

“Basically our goal is to break even, ideally, but basically the shareholders, the owners are really enthusiastic about having a bookshop that stays open and serves the community and sometimes that requires extra input from the shareholders.”

With hundreds of kilometres of shelving to shift, along with hundreds of thousands of books, Jordan said the backing of the community and donations to a Givealittle page played a large part in making Hard to Find’s move happen.

“For example we had to paint the floor because it was concrete, we couldn’t have afforded to paint it if it hadn’t been for give a little, and the shelving, we’ve had to get a lot of shelving.”

With the shop now once again safe from closure Jordan hopes the new, slightly harder-to-find location can thrive within a tough retail climate.

“I just hope they’ll like it. Where we are is iconic, where we were before that was iconic. Can I do iconic again, that’s kind of a big ask, I would hope I create something that people like, and want to come back to and get a buzz out of.”

The shop is expected to open at its new location around mid-March.

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