Often the conversations about climate change and rising seas don’t seem locally relevant because they relate to somewhere else – Houston, a low-lying Pacific atoll, or South Dunedin. Now, new information has emerged which confirms that Thames and other low-lying Coromandel Peninsula towns are some of the most at risk places from rising seas in New Zealand.Read More »
What is the Coastal Inundation Tool?
The Waikato Regional Council has provided a very useful online sea-flooding / inundation tool on its website. The purpose of this tool is to see what low lying coastal areas in Thames -Coromandel may be subject to inundation (sea flooding) from tides, storms and projected sea level rise. The tool uses a “Google maps” type system allowing the user to zoom in on a property, suburb or town and view various sea level rise and storm tide scenarios.Read More »
The Thames Coromandel District Council had their spin machine working overtime when it announced in a misleading press release that the Council’s Mangrove Management Bill was “supported by all the parties, apart from the Greens”.
Often, a majority of Members of Parliament vote for even really stupid Local Bills like this one at the First Reading so that the Bill can to be sent to the to the Select Committee and public submissions can be heard.
That First Reading vote does mean that those same members “support” the Bill. All they are doing in voting for a First Reading is to ensure that the public gets a say at the Select Committee. Read More »
For the first half of last century, 500 square kilometres of the Firth of Thames seafloor was carpeted with green—lipped mussels, but commercial dredging wiped them out by 1960. Now, a new exciting project is using mussel power in an effort to clean up and revive the Gulf. Read More »
The two tailings dams near Waihi are some of the largest structures in the country.
Should either of these dams fail in an earthquake, we could be facing potentially New Zealand’s worst ever environmental disaster, and loss of life and livelihoods on a significant scale.
Therefore it is perfectly reasonable to ask the question – would these structures withstand a large earthquake? The question is even more pertinent because –
Denis Tegg - teggtalk 