COMEDY OF ERRORS.

Shannon News, 29 October 1929, Page 3

COMEDY OF ERRORS.

MANAWATU BRIDGE AT WOODVILLE. The Woodville Examiner relates strange procedure in collection with erection of a new bridge in the. Manawatu Gorge, and it urges that there shoultl be more co-relation of the work of the Main Highways Board and the Public Works Department. It says:— Something in the nature of a comedy of errors has been enacted at the Wood- !

ville end of the Manawatu Gorge. It has been decided that it is necessary to construct a new bridge over the , Manawatu river at this locality. In order that the work would proceed without or ''obstruction, somebody had conceived the idea of diverting traffic along a new road, to be constructed round a treacherous hillside between the old bridge and G e Baliance bridge. This somebody had appir-ntly not taken into account the fact that .1 a former attempt to make a road in the locality had proved a dismal and '-ostly .failure. Nor had he obtained know- • ledge that his proposed road would pass through the Wooville Domain, a r ’ picturesque piece of native bush which •

not even a vandalistic Public Works De-. partment had a legal right to trespass upon and destroy. However, surveys were made, and the line of the propos- v ed road was duly pegged out. A canvas camp was then established on the , Domain, to make provision, for a permanent camp for the accommodation

of unemployed relief workers. When it was discovered that this camp had no right 011 the Domain, without permission being .obtained from the Domain Board, it was hastily removed to a site on private property that had been secured in the neighbourhood of the

old bridge. A start was then made with the establishment of a perman ent camp on the site. Hutments, all ready to be fitted up, were manufactured at a Dannevirke mill, and con- > veyed by motor lorry to the scene of the contemplated road-works. About a score of men were engaged in prepar- 8 ing the camp, and just when the build- I ings—including a capacious cookhouse 1 were completed, and the commissariat I department had been laden with meat, I groceries (the latter purchased somewhere in the Manawatu district), tinned fish, and cooking utensils sufficient to cater for sixty men, the order came, like a bolt from the blue, that the camp had to be dismantled. The two

cooks, and the men on t'he job, at. first thought the order was a joke. But it soon dawned upon them that it was a serious official instruction. Then, the men who had been employed in establishing the camp, set to work to de- : molish it. The commissariat'officer transferred his goods elsewhere, and returned a portion of his meat to the butcher from whom it was purchased in Woodville. The hutments were taken to pieces and stacked up, to await further official instructions, and twelve of the men who had been engaged on the job packed their swags, and were

transferred to relief works at the road at Mt. Bruce. This is as far as the. comedy has proceeded to date. The next scene will be enacted when orders are given to re-erect the hutmnts on the same site, where thy will be required for the accommodation of men engaged in the erection, of temporary and permanent bridges.