Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 96
Actively
supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds
Bonjour, once again to our French friends, who may or may not be rugby people, though you
read it here first – the NZ-French matchup at Cardiff Arms…And this is to say
that everyone down in this hemisphere is very very nervous about what you guys
are going to pull out of your cockaded tricornes this year.
Though now we can get back to our story on pollution in the Wharemauku.
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| Polluted lower reaches of the Wharemauku |
No-one
is talking about this pollution, including the agency that should be monitoring
it, the Greater Wellington Regional Council (GWRC) – our waterway pollutant
watchdog. So we have had to assemble our own evidential record and publish it
here. And bear in mind while we go through this, that the NZTA has denied all
along, through the Board of Inquiry, that there ever was a wetland here.
 |
| Expressway bridge site Raumati beach |
What we
are going to do is try and track what the NZTA has been doing regarding pumping
polluted water into Drain 7 and a good place to start is with water they are
now pumping from the northern site of the bridge construction. They have dug a
stream diversion around the bridge site and are lifting water from this across the Wharemauku, into the area
where the dune lake used to be.
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| Pump taking water from new Wharemauku diversion |
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| Over the Wharemauku and into the destroyed dune lake |
This
water collected in the excavated sand dunes on the north side of the bridge construction. It had been left to settle, so was relatively clear; clear enough perhaps, for it to have been pumped out into the
Wharemauku. They aren’t doing this
however but pumping it back into the site where the dune lake used to be and
which they have previously gone to
a great deal of trouble to drain. The water in the
destroyed lake however, is now filling back to the levels it had reached,
before it was drained in August. And it is that draining drama we are now going to
focus on.
This
new pumping activity however, has been useful in revealing the NZTA’s draining methodology.
The pump was observed around 7am on a Sunday morning (The site is shut down on
a Sunday though work usually begins at 7.30 during the week). It was unattended
and had been left working through Saturday night, though there are residential
houses close by.
 |
| Hard at it. Draining the dune lake early August |
It was
back in August that the NZTA first began draining what was left of the dune
lake. We have noted how the dune lake areas had expanded once the NZTA began
levelling the area and carting sand from the surrounding dune lands onto the
expressway –building up its escarpment. Despite being sat in a swamp basin the
dune lake always ran clean, but with the disturbance of the peat the water on
this site has became polluted.
 |
| Drainage channels to hidden drain. |
The
engineers then began excavating channels between these areas connecting them up
and building a passageway that led back to an inaccessible hidden drain, that channelled water
(underground) into Drain 7 and thence the wharemauku.
 |
| Sump spilling polluted water into hidden drain |
This
was easy to track if you knew what you were looking for; but who would think
the NZTA would begin pumping water into Drain 7 through such a circuitous
farrago. Why go to all that trouble when they might simply spill it straight
into the wharemauku. There might be many reasons for them to do this, though
the one that immediately springs to conservation mind is that they needed to release
this pollutant water, below the monitors set up in the wharemauku to detect
pollution leaking from the site. Why? Because the site could be shut down if
they reached prescribed levels.
 |
| Compressor draining polluted water early August |
We
gathered incontrovertible evidence that that was exactly what the NZTA had
done. And took it to our environmental watchdog – the GWRC…
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| Pollution in Drain 7 early August |
We
have a lot of time for the GWRC,
because it's working in an environmental no-mans-land set up by the Board of
Inquiry. This Board has effectively overruled the RMA leaving the NZTA to work
without environmental legislative oversight so they appear to be making up the rules as they
go along. And these rules are based on expediency. Helping this is the fact that the GWRC have formed a team to
work in close liaison with the NZTA to fast track environmental consent
processes as they arise. As we saw in the financial crisis of 2008 however once Business and its auditors
chum up, expect trouble.
What
we didn’t expect however was that despite this cosy relationship, the GWRC had
no knowledge of what was going on at this excavation site.
We have taken enough of your time in this post however, and will continue this story
in our next one.
Though
here’s an update on our dabchick chicks who are thriving down at the Waikanae
estuary. Which provides a timely reminder of why we’re out here,
undertaking this investigative
toil.
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| Two dabchick chicks with mum. |
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| One noticeably bigger than the other. Heres the largest. |
Track we were listening to while posting
this… we’re on a Carter Family binge so its I'm thinking tonight of my Blue Eyes'
'Twould been better for us both had we never
In this wide and wicked world had never met,
But the pleasure we both seemed to gather
I'm sure, love, I'll never forget
Oh, I'm thinking tonight of my blue eyes
Who is sailing far over the sea
I'm thinking tonight of my blue eyes
And I wonder if he ever thinks of me
The women were the heart and soul of this
band though it was AP who collected the songs, a fascinating toil, that managed to archive songs that stretched back through the 19th century and then some. What it revealed amongst many other things was how music was universally
present in those lives, not simply in the church congregations on Sunday's, but in the kitchens and wash
houses of the local people. They
made music for themselves whereas today (sigh) we spend our time listening to others
make it.
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