Piha’s campground will take bookings again from Monday 19 October, a week before Labour Weekend, after the Waitākere Ranges Local Board voted unanimously on Thursday evening to let overnight camping resume for the summer. The vote went against the advice of Auckland Council staff, who had recommended ending overnight camping at the site permanently because of the risk of a fast flood hitting sleeping campers.
The campground sits on a floodplain beside Piha Stream within Piha Domain and has been closed since the end of May. Manager Fiona Anderson, who has run it for more than 26 years, agreed to a three-month winter closure at the council’s request so the board could consider the site’s future. She told RNZ in September that a week before her planned late-August reopening she was told she was no longer allowed to open, and that the closure was costing her around $1,000 a day.
The decision came at an extraordinary meeting in Henderson on 15 October that drew around 80 Piha residents, many of whom spoke in the public forum in support of the campground. Anderson told RNZ afterwards that the result was a relief.
“My campers will be so pleased. And obviously I’m pleased. I now have an ability to earn a living again,” she said. “I’m opening on Monday, baby.”
The council’s own statement, published on OurAuckland on Thursday, says the campground can operate for the 2026/27 summer season from October to May, with the lease continuing month to month. Reopening is subject to flood warning systems, monitoring, evacuation procedures and other operational controls being in place. Anderson has submitted a risk management plan, which the council says will be independently reviewed. She told RNZ she was already satisfied those conditions had been met.
“I’ve done my TARP (trigger action response plan). I’ve had it independently reviewed by a health and safety lawyer and she informs me we’re good to go,” she said.
The staff report put to the board makes sobering reading. Updated flood modelling by the council’s Healthy Waters department found most of the site is classed as high flood hazard or worse in both one-in-ten-year and one-in-100-year rain events, with modelled flood depths greater than half a metre across the whole site. In a one-in-100-year event adjusted for climate change, most of the campground is modelled as very high hazard. Camping is treated as a hazard-sensitive activity because occupants may be asleep and unable to respond to a flood that develops quickly.
The report leans heavily on two past floods. Part of the campground flooded in 2018 with no weather warning in place, and a council report that year found future flooding could result in loss of life. On the night of 30 August 2021, during the Covid-19 lockdown when the campground was empty, a flash flood overtook Piha under only a heavy rain watch. A council camera recorded the stream flowing normally within its channel at 9.33pm. By 10.38pm it had burst its banks and was running across the road. Staff say the catchment is steep and fast-filling, with a lag of just 60 to 90 minutes between peak rainfall and peak flood, and that the 2021 flood would have hit the campground before the rainfall trigger in Anderson’s evacuation plan was even reached.
Engineering fixes have been looked at before. A 2019 options assessment by Healthy Waters and Tonkin and Taylor considered stream widening, dredging, detention dams, diversion tunnels and raising structures, and the report says “no practical, feasible or cost-effective engineering solution had been identified that would remove the underlying flood risk affecting the campground.” Flood cameras and gauges were judged to offer only limited benefit because of the short warning time and Piha’s poor connectivity in bad weather.
Staff assessed two options. The first was to end overnight camping and wind up the month-to-month occupancy, which has been in place since the lease expired in April 2020. The second was to allow camping for this summer only under an independently certified trigger action response plan. Staff recommended the first, concluding that under the second “a significant residual life-safety risk remains which is inconsistent with the council’s adopted risk appetite.” Warning systems and evacuation plans were ranked as administrative controls, the least effective tier in the council’s risk framework, and the report says “these measures do not materially alter the underlying flood hazard or the residual life-safety risk of overnight camping.”
Against that, the report acknowledges the campground is a valued community asset with strong public support, including a petition, and that it hosts surf competitions and school groups. Anderson reported 15,000 visitors in 2025. Surfing New Zealand chief executive Ben Kennings told RNZ last week that without the campground “it’s highly unlikely that we can run the national champs at Piha. There’s just not enough accommodation,” with the Surfing Nationals due at the beach in January.
Board chair Mark Allen said the board accepted the risks were real but believed they could be managed, and that the economic case weighed heavily.
“We could see that if we didn’t have that campground there, we could see there was going to be a collapse of a whole series of businesses in the area,” he told RNZ. “We need to have a conversation with people about that risk. We know that the Waitakere ranges are loved as a wild place. So part of this is accepting this wildness accepting we need to live with it.”
In the council statement he was more measured. “This hasn’t been an easy decision. Piha Campground is located within a known floodplain, and with climate change bringing more frequent and severe extreme weather events, we must carefully consider how the site is used, the risks involved, and the potential impacts on our local community,” Allen said. He added that the board understood the council’s obligations under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, and that “the challenge is to determine what steps are reasonably practicable to eliminate risks or, where that is not possible, minimise them.”
Allen also told RNZ the problem is not going away. “Around the country we’re going to be facing this issue more and more with climate change,” he said. “We have noticed it in the ranges. We’re having more high rainfall impact events. Our ground is already unstable and we had so many slips after Gabrielle. We’re still repairing them now.”
The board has asked staff to report back early next year on what it would take to keep the campground open in future summers, including early flood warning options and an assessment of ground levels in the domain. Auckland Council’s Mace Ward told RNZ the council was rolling out trigger action response plans at campgrounds across its regional parks and working with leaseholders such as Anderson to do the same.
For now the operator has what she wanted. Anderson said she would hold off opening this weekend so the Piha community could celebrate first. “It’s party time, it almost feels wrong that I won’t be having a drink because I’ve been sober for 20 years, but this is not an occasion to let the boat slip,” she said. Whether the campground is still taking bookings next summer is a question the board has deferred, and one the staff report suggests will come back harder each time the rain gauge on Piha Stream runs high.
Have you camped at Piha, or do you live in the valley? Is the local board right to back the campground against the advice of its own flood engineers? 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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