State Highway 3 through the Awakino Gorge will close completely for four days later this month, the ninth time in 2026 that the main link between Taranaki and the Waikato has been shut for storm damage or repairs. For the handful of businesses in Mōkau that live off passing traffic, it is another stretch of the calendar with the till barely ringing.
NZTA has confirmed the gorge will be closed between the rest area near the historic tunnel and the intersection of SH3 and Manganui Road from 6am on Saturday 22 August until 6pm on Tuesday 25 August. If the weather turns and the work cannot go ahead, it will be pushed back a week to Saturday 29 August through to Tuesday 1 September.
The job is the installation of three culverts to carry water away from the huge slip that came down in April and into the Awakino River. At the moment that water is running across the road surface, which slows the rest of the recovery and keeps the risk of further movement alive. Installing the culverts means digging the road open, and the working space in the gorge is too narrow to keep traffic moving past deep trenches and heavy machinery.
Dev Rawat, who owns the River Run Cafe in Mōkau, told RNZ the closures were devastating for his business. “We depend on the people who passing through State Highway 3 and when the road is shut no one come into the cafe and that impact us lots,” he said. “So, we have to shut our business for those days, and last time we were shut for five days and there was no business.”
Rawat said the repeated shutdowns had made it hard to keep up with the basics of running a small business and he wanted the government to look at some form of compensation. “It’s hard to pay our staff, pay bills and everything,” he said.
Bryan Lester, who runs the Mōkau butcher shop, said he had mixed feelings because he could see both sides of it. The culverts genuinely needed replacing and there was no easy way to do that with trucks coming and going, he said, but the timing still hurt. During the last closure he served five customers in an entire day, and he expects to simply lock the door for the four days rather than stand behind an empty counter.
NZTA incident controller Kendra Ludeke said shutting the road was always the last option considered. “We wouldn’t be closing the road unless there was another way,” she said, adding that other approaches had been looked at and this one got the culverts in and the road reopened fastest. The section is already down to a single lane because of the slip above it, and Ludeke said keeping road workers and daily commuters safe made a full closure unavoidable.
She acknowledged the disruption ahead for local communities, businesses, freight operators, emergency services and anyone travelling between the two regions, and thanked people for their patience over the past few months. Getting the culverts in, she said, was a big step forward in the recovery of the road and sets up the next stage of the work.
New Plymouth mayor Max Brough said closures at Awakino had become part of the rhythm of the year in Taranaki. The trouble, as he put it, is that there is no easily accessible alternative route, so every closure pushes traffic a long way around. “Look, it’s disappointing, but you can’t fix something without doing the work, can you?” he said.
That detour is the crux of the problem. NZTA’s recommended alternative is the SH1 and SH4 route, which for a truck heading from New Plymouth to Hamilton means hours of extra driving and a fuel bill to match. Freight operators wear that cost, and so do the towns along the gorge that sell coffee, meat, petrol and pies to people who would otherwise have driven straight through.
The April weather event was the worst the gorge has seen in years. Heavy rain brought down about 39 slips and six underslips, closing the road completely for two weeks. It reopened in early May under escorted convoys, then moved to stop and go traffic management, and did not return to two-way traffic until 20 May. Newswire covered the reopening and the convoy arrangements at the time. Even now the gorge is treated as an active worksite with live slip areas that can be shut at short notice on a geotechnical call.
The route has now been closed 14 times since July 2021, which is why the gorge was singled out for $50 million in Budget 2026, carved out of a wider $400 million package for strengthening vulnerable parts of the state highway network. That money is earmarked for slope stabilisation, better drainage and culverts, small retaining walls and other measures aimed at stopping the same thing happening again. It is still being worked up, and Taranaki leaders have a say in how it gets spent.
Importantly, the culverts going in this month are not part of that package. They are being delivered separately as part of the recovery from April, with the goal of getting this stretch of SH3 back to two lanes. The resilience money is the longer game, and nobody in Mōkau expects to feel it this winter.
For now the advice is simple enough. Anyone planning to travel between Taranaki and the Waikato over that long weekend in late August should either go early, go late, or budget for the SH1 and SH4 run, and check the NZTA Journey Planner before setting off in case the weather moves the dates again.
Have the Awakino Gorge closures affected your travel or your business? 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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