Hawke’s Bay Regional Council contractors and staff have installed two cameras to monitor the Wairoa River mouth.

The cameras are positioned to the north and south of the river mouth to provide maximum coverage of the potential areas that the mouth opening could travel or move to. The cameras will take hourly pictures of the river mouth that will feed back to the regional council’s monitoring centre. The frequency of photos will be increased during weather events.

The regional council’s Wairoa councillor, Di Roadley, said they were pleased to get the cameras up earlier than planned.

“These cameras will now be part of our region-wide river level monitoring during weather events.”

The next step is to set up a regular feed to the Wairoa District Council and make the camera views available to the public on HBRC’s website. Roadley said this will happen in the coming weeks.