Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 120
Actively
supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds
Those
who have been regular followers of this environmental story will be familiar
with the watch we have been keeping on the levels of pollution entering our local
waterway –the Wharemauku- through the destruction of a rare dune lake here at
Raumati Beach. This controversy has
recently hit the headlines in a local paper.
The
safety of our waterways is in the hands of the Greater Wellington Regional
Council (GWRC) and they have
responded to the discolouration in the story above. Regional Council competence is coming
under fire after an outbreak of severe enteritus over recent weeks infected
5000 in Havelock North and made international headlines. It has been
provisionally traced through the town water supply to local dairy farming.
Our
local pollution story was stimulated by a graphic image of the polluted Wharemauku
taken by Jamie Guertjiens, but the pollution isn't new and here are some more images we have taken over the last two years.
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| Wharemauku |
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| Wharemauku |
And here is the Wharemauku before the M2PP excavation got underway.
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| White faced heron in lower reaches of Wharemauku before M2PP |
Here is why we don’t believe the WGRC.
We have been watching this stream for five years now, and these levels began
to rise sharply when expressway
excavation started, while the red colouration began appearing when locally
quarried rock was trucked to the site.
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| Drain 7 - The drain opposite is running clear |
The GWRC is correct in locating the pollution source as ‘natural’ but it
is the level, density and constant flow of the pollution which are at issue.
Discolouration occurs after rain but it previously cleared within two or three
days. It still does this in drains that are not linked to the expressway. The
GWRC as the guardian of our waterways, should know this. Nor does it take any initiative to follow the pollution back to its source in Drain 7.
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| Drain 7 |
We laid a complaint with them last year over two issues – the pumping of
polluted water from the NZTA excavations into the Wharemauku below pollution
monitors. These were set up at the directive of the Board of Inquiry that issued consents
for this work which could close the site down if pollution reached unacceptable
levels. We also provided evidence that the pollution monitors themselves had been out of commission for months on
end.
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| In hiding Dysfunctional Pollution monitor |
We got a reply similar to the one supplied to the Kapiti News, until we
showed them photographs of the NZTA pumps at work. The GWRC advised that the
NZTA didn’t have a consent to discharge into the Wharemauku, so they then got
off their laptops and undertook a more serious investigation. The result
determined that under National Government regulation, the NZTA could do pretty
much whatever it wanted.
Why didn’t the GWRC know this?
What the NZTA further
advised however was that it had workers with hand monitors stationed on the
banks of the stream while this pumping had been going on. We had never seen
this, though what we had seen were pumps hard at work early Sunday morning with
no-one around. But we had to take them at their word until this years autumn rains
set in. The NZTA had denied all along that there was a dune lake down here and
finding that there was one and that their excavations had enlarged it, they now
opened a permanent drain into Drain 7. Here it is...
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| Polluted water from M2PP draining into Drain 7 then to the Wharemauku below the pollution monitors |
This empties into the Wharemauku below the monitors and is the primary
source of the pollution.
One indicator of its seriousness has been that local ducks are now
avoiding these lower reaches. Marine life in this rich and delicately balanced
waterway, must be similarly affected.
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| Drain 7 pollution into the Wharemauku |
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| Turning the Wharemauku to Styx -Recent foto of polluted stream |
Other waterways that appear to be impacted by the disturbance of this
1000 year old swamp are Andrews Pond and Ratanui Road though our readers will
be interested to learn that Forest and Bird are keeping a close watch on these
developments.
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| A blackened Andrews Pond |
Next post – Trouble at Mill? – A whistleblower gives an account of
problems inside the M2PP expressway consortium.
Track we were listening to while posting this – Slim Whitman A Fool Such as I
Now and then there's a fool such as I am over you
You taught me how-ow to love and now-ow
Now you say we're through
Bob Dylan ran a version of this off through his peerlessly glass papered throat and nose, though nothing can compare with this operatic tenor
that came boating out of American country and then western music through the fifties… Susie cant abide this so we're sneaking it in unbeknownst.
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