Dear Metro Editor
Thank you for both being visionary and investigative in looking at the question of global warming, in particular rising sea levels. I sent the below
piece out to a large email network across Auckland yet the response up until now has been muted. Why?
That question has yet to be answered.
This was the email:
Climate change sea levels to drown Auckland harbour bridge engineers aspirations? Whilst environmental groups drive past and remain deathly silent!
Ministry of Land Transport, planners and engineers have decided that global warming and climate change obviously does not exist or is definitely not
a threat?
The new motorway road works being constructed at the waters edge, on Auckland's Harbour bridge where Onewa road starts at the Northern end of the
harbour bridge implies that rising sea levels must be a myth
The pillars that have been built nearly at sea level for the overhead bridges, have been built to a minimal height, so low that they only allow for
the smallest amount of clearance for the tops of large trucks and vehicles that will travel underneath.
This road is so close to sea level, that in the early 1990s an Easterly storm that coincided with a spring tide, blew white wave froth across the
road area, where once the toll plaza was situated. The water and wind enhanced waves were lapping at the motorways edge!
If Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth' becomes reality and sea levels rise, "we the people are going to have to pay higher taxes to have the roads built
up in that area. However, this will incur huge extra costs, because the raising of the height of the road, means that large trucks and vehicles will
not be able to drive under the ‘new over head bridges' because there will be no available clearance, as this has not been planned for.
Though we are being told by Govt and Gore about sea level rises - it's being ignored by Auckland's motorway builders ... why?
The costs of constructing expensive new bridges can be alleviated if the bridges being built have factored in their construction a greater height
specification, so that when the contingency for building up the roads in 25 to 40 years time is needed, there will still be room for large trucks and
vehicles to drive underneath these bridges, without losing their roof!
The costs to build extra height into these bridges today would be minimal.
How have intelligent builders failed to see this?
Why is there not a huge out-cry by the tens of thousands of intelligent motorists that drive on this road every day, are we collectively
being dumbed down?
Get in your car - go burn off some greenhouse gasses and have a look for yourself? Photograph it - better still video it for posterity!
This, like the gap between the planners ears will very soon all be set in concrete.
As a city will we all be made to look like lemmings by 2080?
The Millennium Stadium on the wharves was stopped in part due to the realisation of rising sea levels, but not the motorway, which is far closer to
sea level.
Anyway - 'nuff said:)