Wales Online | A company has said it takes its responsibility to the environment very seriously after being fined for its part in a landslip in New Zealand.
Skyline Enterprises Ltd was fined in Christchurch, New Zealand, after pleading guilty to a charge along with two other companies to an offence under the country’s Resource Management Act.
The three companies were responsible for unlawfully discharging sediment and construction spoil onto land which overlooked a community in Queenstown, South Island, between March and September 2023.
During very heavy rainfall one night in September of that year, a significant quantity of this material slid down and onto a street leading to the evacuation of 41 residents from their homes.
In sentencing comments at Christchurch District Court the judge said that the physics of having an unstable pile of construction spoil and sediment on the brow of a steep slope then adding heavy rainfall was easy to contemplate.
The material had been excavated on behalf of Skyline Enterprises as part of a major upgrade of its Queenstown gondola attraction. It was stored outside the area consented for this purpose and lacked sediment and erosion controls.
The judge said the three defendants had made a choice “in favour of commercial expediency”. He said Skyline Enterprises’s culpability was “very careless” rather than reckless and less so “by some margin” compared to the contractor it had commissioned.
The hearing heard that Skyline Enterprises got on with remediation work on a “no expenses spared” basis, that it offered sincere apologies for the distress caused to the community, and that it had operated in Queenstown for 60 years with an otherwise unblemished environmental record.
The judge imposed a fine on the company totalling $271,000. This was less than the one handed to the contractor and more than the one imposed on the sub-contractor.
