Sounds Air 'rescue' flight organised for top of the south tech festival
With State Highway 6 destroyed by slips and slumps, a chartered flight over the Whangamoas this week has “saved our bacon”, organisers of a tech festival say.
The Empower Te Rangapikikōtuku eSports and Coding Festival was set to start on Thursday at the ASB Theatre in Blenheim, and festival organisers said they couldn’t rely on the road to Nelson being reopened in time for a group of key people to make the event.
Both roads between Blenheim and Nelson remained closed on Tuesday, after a deluge of rain caused damage to SH6 and SH63.
Waka Kotahi acting national maintenance and operations manager Mark Owen said on Monday that it could take up to a week for those roads to open, given the extent of the damage was still unknown.
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“We have no idea when the road may get reopened, and obviously there’s a decent chance that it won't [before Thursday],” Marlborough Chamber of Commerce general manager Pete Coldwell said.
The chamber had organised the festival in collaboration with iwi, industry, schools and tertiary institutions across Marlborough, Nelson/Tasman and the West Coast.
Coldwell said after hearing of the highway closures, the organising team realised a group of seven event speakers and workshop facilitators from Nelson probably wouldn’t be able to make it to the festival.
That’s when they reached out to Blenheim-based airline, Sounds Air, “to see if they might be able to come to the rescue”.
The airline came back “straight away” to say they could help, Coldwell said.
The cost of the charter flight would be
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