Uncertain future for main state highway into Kaitaia

The future of the main state highway to Kaitaia is up in the air, after heavy rain in August left the Mangamuka Gorge pockmarked with deep fissures and large slips.

The extent of the damage which led to the closure of a 15-kilometre stretch of State Highway 1 was evident just minutes into a guided media tour, after a motorist was left trapped inside her vehicle with no cell phone coverage or passing traffic after leaving the road.

She was found this morning after 15 hours by contractors working in the area.

Waka Kotahi New Zealand Transport Agency regional manager system design, Randhir Karma, said work is underway to assess "the extent to which the damage has occurred" and the ground's movement.

"We don't have the answers to it yet but we're working with our crews as fast as we can to try and determine exactly what that looks like."

The cracks in the ruins are deep and ripple out, and multiple slips tower over the already beaten road.

With the ground continuing to move up to two metres at a time and engineers without a full picture of the damage, the future of the highway remains uncertain.

"It's so much more devastating in real life than you could ever imagine from the pictures," deputy Far North mayor Ann Court said.

"It's not until you stand here and get a feel for the scale and the sheer number of slips and fractures in the network that you start to realise what a big job we've got ahead of us."

It’s also made an enormous impact on locals, with communities split on either side of the gorge and the detour through SH10 adding at least one hour of travel time.

"We recognise the disruption this has caused," Karma said. "We're dealing with a good number of these sorts of slips which is not easy to repair and they're quite an engineering challenge to try and resolve."

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Court said the "future is not just going to be fixing this road" but "looking at alternate routes".

"We know this road will fail again and again, no matter how much money we throw at it."