Community leaders in the small Far North town of Moerewa are calling for a long-standing culture of doing “burnouts” to end before it ends in tragedy.
According to locals, people burning rubber and smoking up homes was a weekly occurrence.
Roddy Hapati Pihema said there were burnout marks on almost every street in Moerewa.
Pihema, who headed the Taumatamakuku Community Residents Representative Committee, said the problem was so widespread that even the police did not know how to deal with it.
“The police have basically given up. Half the community wants the behaviour to stop, but you still have this generation where it has become part of their modern-day culture.
“At a tangi, they might go out and do burnouts on the road. It’s the same when people have their 21st or a big birthday.
“It’s become part of the culture of not just Moerewa, but everywhere you look in the North.”
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For Pihema, the issue was personal. He said a relative of his was killed when he was struck on a footpath by a motorcyclist who was doing burnouts at night about 20 years ago.
“I’ve felt what it’s like when things go terribly wrong when you lose a family member that way.
“This is not the type of culture that we need to be passing on to the next generation. The thrill of doing burnouts should never ever be more important than the safety of our community and our community members.”
In 2015, Pihema said students at Moerewa Primary gave a letter to the mayor and police, asking them to make their town safer.
Piehma – also the local board member for the Moerewa Kawakawa subdivision – said they had tried to honour this request by introducing mitigators like speed bumps.
But he said the local board and police were under-resourced and needed support to address the issue.
Moerewa Civil Defence volunteer and Otiria Marae trustee, Mike Butler, said burnouts were causing a myriad of issues but some residents were too intimidated to speak up.
“When a person does a burnout, tyre smoke goes into people and kaumata and kuia’s homes.
“Rubber left on the roads causes a massive headache. It blocks up our drains, and when we get Mother Nature at her best it can’t handle it because of all the blockages of debris, rubbish, leaves and also tyres.”
He said children walking to school were also cutting their feet on pieces of smashed glass.
Another resident, Pamela-Ann Simon-Baragwanath, said locals were cleaning up the mess left behind by street racers every week.
“When they do these burnouts they dump rubbish in large volumes. I cleaned up the old KiwiRail entrance four or five months ago and we pulled out about seven to eight trailer loads to the max, we hand-pulled all of that out and took it to the dump.”
She said the litter was seeping into the waterways and attracting rats, and the community was fed up. She wanted to see more cameras installed as a deterrent, and burnouts contained to a location that would not cause ongoing problems.
Police and the Far North District Council have been contacted for comment.
By Jessica Hopkins of rnz.co.nz
