Dumping One Million Litres of Sludge A Day into Cook Strait – Just Not On

Opinion by Andi Cockroft, CORANZ chairman

According to reports in the New Zealand Herald here, Wellington City councillor Sean Rush suggests dumping One Million Litres of Sludge per day into Cook Strait to save costs. Blaming Covid-19 as a reason Wellington City Council needs to look at cost-saving measures.

Wellngton Heads and Cook Strait

As a resident of this spendthrift Council, it comes as no surprise WCC suddenly finds itself facing problems of funding as other revenue sources dry up. Parking now provides zero income, other income from services such as refuse are much reduced.

Money seems to appear miraculously for projects such as artwork, roundabouts, cycle lane experiments, leisure centre et al.

We have a Smart Capital Plan, an Urban Growth Plan, a Housing Strategy, Centres Policy, a Waterfront Framework, and Northern Growth Framework to name but a few. All at no small price to Ratepayers.

Yet this is the same Council recently faced with repairing nearly century old drains beneath the City Centre in Dixon and Willis Streets. Primarily Wellington Water carrying much of the blame for this, yet they are relative new-comers having been formed as recently as 2014. The apparent age of the infrastructure suggest remedial work should have been undertaken perhaps even decades ago.

Of course the latest problem with waste water and sewage finding their way into the harbour is sadly no isolated incident. It’s being happening a long time, and no way forward other than fix on fail seems on the horizon.

One-off Issue?

Wellington Water chief executive Colin Crampton is quoted as saying “Wellington Water was ‘comfortable’ with the way it managed the pipes”. “We just think this is a one-off issue, particularly in this area. But… we’re going to check other parts of the network to make sure we haven’t got the same sort of problems.”

Unfortunately, the effluent from Wellington CBD and the Willis Street debacle is pumped around the bays to the Moa Point Treatment Plant south of the Airport.

So now, we have the new effluent problem at Moa Point, itself.

With an outflow pipe a mere 1.8km out into the Strait, as far as I can determine Wellington Water have a permit to pump 3,000 litres per second of “disinfected” slurry out to sea. It would take a good, fully independent ecologist to establish the true effects of this behaviour.

In addition, under certain circumstances, when Moa Point is overwhelmed by sewage, the surplus untreated sewage can be pumped directly to sea. And that’s on a good day.

Failure

The latest failure however is in two discrete pipes running from the Moa Point Treatment Plant all the way to the Southern Landfill a distance of about 9Km. Each pipe operates as a backup for the other, but we have a “rare” double failure.

This slurry – a by-product of the Sewage processing system – is normally pumped to the Landfill, but until at least one of the pipes can be brought back into service, trucking is the only acceptable alternative.

To fix the problem it seems requires products from overseas, which given the current situation is proving problematic. 

However, Sean Rush has the answer – let’s just pollute Cook Strait

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