As you will know due to extensive media coverage, a tornado went through Papatoetoe and Wiri on Saturday morning, leaving in its wake tragedy and extensive damage.

This severe and freak weather event has caused extensive damage to our South Auckland Freight Hub on Wiri Station Road. More upsetting, however, is one of our valued suppliers had a staff member tragically lose their life while working at the South Auckland Freight Hub. A further two workers were hospitalised while working alongside us at the empty container depot.

Our deepest sympathies goes out to the family affected by this tragedy, and our best wishes go to the hospitalised colleagues and their families for a speedy recovery. A full site blessing occurred this morning due to the tragedy.

Yesterday, we worked alongside the emergency services teams and WorkSafe to ensure the devastation of the event is fully captured. WorkSafe handed back the site to us on late Saturday afternoon. We have appointed Ward Demolition as our site recovery lead; Ward Demolition were instrumental in the recovery operations post the Christchurch earthquake.

Quite early on we had assessed that the extent of damage was well beyond the capabilities of Conlinxx and the Ports of Auckland. We estimate around 400 containers have sustained damage to some degree. Jointly, our management team along with Ward Demolition and WorkSafe have agreed upon a recovery plan. We have moved four heavy lift cranes onto site and they are now in the process of salvaging damaged containers and restoring our container stacks back to some form of safe organised stability. This process will take most of next week and will then allow us to assess the damaged lifters, office block, power transformers, lighting towers and truck fleet.

Until this remedial action is substantially complete, the South Auckland Freight Hub will remain closed for cross docking, road and rail operations.

Our next steps:

• We are currently moving all the refrigerated containers back to the Port, as we have no on-site power. This will be completed by midday Monday.
• KiwiRail are assisting us by allowing us to temporarily use the Southdown rail exchange. This will commence on Monday morning.
• Other deliveries will continue direct to and from Port, and we have engaged a number of our transport partners to assist with capacity.
• As the salvage operations continue we will pull damaged, full containers out of our grids for further assessment.
• Our customer service teams will be in touch with you directly with your container details as and when the salvage cranes have them available for inspection.

Please be assured we will work as quickly as possible to bring our site back to full operations after taking the appropriate safety precautions. We will continue to update on the progress of our recovery operation throughout the week.

Please continue to direct all queries through our customer services team who are here to help.

Thank you for your understanding.

Darcy Hart
CEO, Nexus Logistics & Conlinxx