About 60 percent of New Zealand’s electricity comes from hydro. That figure is the country’s strongest single piece of climate insulation. It is also a number that has costs attached to it which are no longer counted on any balance sheet, because they were paid in the 20th century, in the form of towns and settlements that no longer exist.
This is a piece about the places New Zealand drowned to build its hydroelectric system.
Old Cromwell, the famous one
Cromwell sat at the confluence of the Kawarau and Clutha rivers in Central Otago, founded in 1862 in the gold rush and named for Oliver Cromwell. By the early 1980s the town centre, with its 19th-century stone arch bridge over the Clutha, its bank, its single-storey commercial main street and the orchards spreading along both rivers, had been declared a casualty of the proposed Clyde Dam.
Construction of the dam began in 1982. By 1990 the wall was finished. The valley behind it began to fill in 1992 and was at full lake level by early 1993. The new Lake Dunstan stretched back 26 kilometres along the Clutha and into the Kawarau arm, and the original Cromwell town centre disappeared underneath it.
The numbers behind that single sentence are uncomfortable. The Ministry of Works and Development purchased about 2,500 hectares of land for the project. Within it were 19 commercial orchards, including some of the country’s best apricot, cherry and peach ground. Fifty commercial premises and 60 residences in the town centre were demolished or removed. Roughly 280 people were displaced. The 1875 Cornish-built stone arch bridge over the Clutha was demolished.
The buildings that survived did so because a group of residents who called themselves Save Old Cromwell formed in the mid-1980s and fought, building by building, for the relocation of historic structures to higher ground on the new lake shore. The result is the Old Cromwell heritage precinct, a small cluster of colonial-era commercial buildings, dismantled and rebuilt above the waterline. The photograph at the top of this article is what they saved. The much larger town beneath the lake is what they did not.
The political memory of Cromwell is one of the reasons hydro proposals now meet such determined opposition in New Zealand. The Project Aqua scheme, proposed in 2003 for the lower Waitaki and quietly abandoned in 2004 by Meridian Energy, ran into a level of public anger that took the corporate sector by surprise. Project Aqua was not Cromwell, but the country remembered Cromwell.
Horahora, the forgotten one
Long before Cromwell, the Waikato River drowned a complete township that almost no one now remembers.
Horahora was built in 1913 by the Waihi Gold Mining Company on the banks of the Waikato River near Cambridge, originally to supply electricity to the Waihi gold mines on the Coromandel. It was a purpose-built company town. It had a school, a post office, a Stationmaster’s house, workers’ cottages, a powerhouse and a small dam. By the 1930s, with public ownership of generation expanding, it had been folded into the national grid.
In the early 1940s, the much larger Karāpiro Dam was built downstream. When Karāpiro filled in 1947, the rising lake submerged Horahora completely. The powerhouse, the dam, the school, the houses, the streets, all of it went under. There was no Save Old Horahora campaign. The community that lived there was relocated, the buildings demolished or left to flood, and the entire township ceased to exist as a place.
What is striking about Horahora, compared to Cromwell, is how little remains of it culturally. Cromwell’s story is sold to tourists at the heritage precinct, with photographs and a small museum. Horahora has a memorial plaque and a stretch of lake. The Waikato hydro corridor between Lake Taupō and Karāpiro now contains eight dams. The most upstream, Aratiatia, regulates the Huka Falls. The most downstream, Karāpiro itself, is the one that buried the town.
The Mackenzie and Waitaki schemes
The Mackenzie Basin and the upper Waitaki below it are the largest single hydro system in the Southern Hemisphere outside the Snowy scheme. Tekapo A station was commissioned in 1951. Lake Pukaki was raised by 9 metres in the late 1970s to feed Tekapo B. Lake Tekapo itself was raised, drowning the original lake shoreline including a popular swimming bay. Benmore came on stream in 1965, Aviemore in 1968, and Ōhau A, B and C in the early 1980s.
The Waitaki settlements lost to those dams were smaller than Cromwell and smaller than Horahora. They included the original Kurow township ground, parts of the Otematata flat, and several Mackenzie Basin homesteads. The largest single act of construction-era displacement in the Waitaki scheme was actually the temporary town of Otematata itself, which housed 4,000 workers during the construction of Benmore and was largely dismantled after the dam was completed. Otematata today is a much smaller township sitting on the same bench. The lake it overlooks is what built it and what shrank it.
The Clutha corridor
The Clutha and Kawarau rivers carry the bulk of the country’s hydro storage outside the Waitaki. The Roxburgh Dam, downstream of Cromwell, was commissioned in 1956 and created Lake Roxburgh, a much smaller lake than Lake Dunstan but one which still flooded a series of riverside settlements and farms along the lower Cromwell Gorge. The original Roxburgh Hydro township, built for the construction workers, was largely demolished once the dam was complete.
Between Roxburgh and Cromwell, the Cromwell Gorge took most of the visible loss. The Gorge had been a working landscape of orchards, small holdings and bench houses. All of it went under in 1992 and 1993. The State Highway 8 alignment was rebuilt at higher elevation, and the bench tracks that ran along the old gorge floor are now beneath the lake surface.
Why this still matters
The country is in the middle of a long-running argument about how to add electricity capacity without adding emissions. New geothermal, more wind, more solar, batteries, possibly offshore wind, possibly more hydro. The hydro option is the cheapest per unit of firm capacity. It is also the most politically expensive, because the population now contains people who remember the previous round and have a clear view of what it cost.
That memory is not abstract. It is Old Cromwell as it was photographed in 1989, and the stone arch bridge as it was demolished in 1990, and the orchards under 30 metres of water at the south end of Lake Dunstan, and the powerhouse at Horahora sitting silent on the riverbed beneath Karāpiro. Whatever the country decides about its next round of large-scale generation, those places are part of how the decision will be made.
If you want to see where the existing hydro stations sit in the wider electricity system, Newswire’s NZ Grid Live tool shows real-time output from 76 generation stations around the country, including all the major hydro plants. The Conservation Areas Explorer includes the present-day lake shores that cover much of what is described above.
Is there a drowned town or lost place in New Zealand you remember, or that your family remembers? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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