We have been asked to state our case in one sentence - here it is: "An inflated baseline flood model means Pinehaven is unprotected from large volumes of additional runoff from future big developments that will cause bigger, more frequent and widespread flooding in Pinehaven". We intend to release a series of posts to substantiate the above claim in bite-size bits. The post we made yesterday on 18 Feb 2021 (with the two ladies and pipes) links with our previous post on 16 Feb 2021 (Council's 1-in-100 year flood map for Pinehaven) and focusses on our first bite-sized bit of information addressing the fact that Council's flood map IS grossly inflated. That's the one key point we are communicating with these two posts - that the flood map is NOT representing a 1-in-100 year event as was recorded by a Wellington Regional Water Board engineer in 1977 and claimed by Council today; rather it represents an event that is even bigger than the 1976 flood event which was at least a 1:500 and maybe as big as 1:3,000 year event, as stated by expert hydrologist Graeme Horrell: "I looked at the 1976 event and some of the [1977] report. I actually thought the report was very well done on that [1976] event. ... I thought the engineer was pretty brave to say it was 1,000 year rainfall ... back in 1976 … The thing is now with HIRDSv4… that rainfall touches on a 10,000 year event [not far from Pinehaven at Taita, ex-DSIR Research Station]. One thing I ... disagree with is that he [the engineer] put it at a 100 year [flood] return period. I think it was much greater than that. I used two regional flood studies, the McKerchar/Pearson, and the Henderson one, and they run between a 500 year event and a 3,000 year event for what happened in Pinehaven." (Hydrological expert Graeme Horrell, at a Planning Hearing in Upper Hutt, August 2020). Hydrologists typically want to know two things - how big was the rainfall event, and how big was the resulting flood event? In this case for the flood on 20th December 1976 Graeme Horrell, a very experienced hydrologist, concluded that it was at least a 1,000-year rainfall event in Pinehaven (a 10,000 year rainfall event nearby in Taita), and a flood event that was somewhere in the range of a 500-3,000 year event in Pinehaven/Silverstream. This is the one key point we want the public to understand from these recent posts, that Council's Pinehaven flood map is much, much bigger than a 100-year flood event, vastly bigger. Subsequent posts will explain the tricks Council used to inflate this flood map, and why an inflated baseline flood map is a lethal problem that must, for Pinehaven's safety, be properly addressed and fixed.