Residents in Wellington's Owhiro Bay say the sewage smell is the worst it’s been in decades after a sewage spill at a nearby landfill.
Sewage sludge is being trucked 24 hours a day to the nearby Southern Landfill, after wastewater pipes burst in January at a separate treatment plant, but there was a spill at the landfill on Monday.
Owhiro Bay Residents Association member Sue Reid says there’s been a "terrible odour" in Owhiro Bay since the spill.
“Locals have been reporting sort of whiffs of a very nasty gassy faecal smell”, she says.
It’s just the latest water-related issue in the suburb, and in Wellington, contamination levels in the stream that feeds into Owhiro Bay have reached up to 43 times the safe to swim levels in recent months.
The latest contamination figures show the stream is currently at seven times the safe to swim level.
Wellington Water, the organisation in charge of Wellington’s water infrastructure fronted to media today to present plans to fix ongoing issues like water and sewage pipe bursts.
Chief Executive Colin Crampton said the contamination at Owhiro Bay isn’t related to sludge at the nearby landfill but was the result of cross-connections between sewage and water pipes at private homes and that an investigation into the issue is ongoing.
“My understanding is we're nearly complete and we should be able to understand what we're going to be doing about that in the next few weeks.”
In December about five million litres of sewage spilled into Wellington Harbour after a major pipe burst.
And residents in Island Bay have faced water outages after other pipe bursts.
A burst water pipe in the suburb of Kingston last month caused the road to buckle, that incident also caused silty water to pour into Island Bay beach as locals swam.
Environmental management group Water New Zealand says Wellington has some of the oldest water pipes in the country, and some are in the poorest condition of any main centre.
Many pipes are made of materials like terracotta and asbestos cement. It's estimated half of them will have to be replaced over the next 30 years, but there are questions over whether Wellington Water is fit to do the job.
Wellington City Councillor Fleur Fitzsimons says “questions need to be asked” about Wellington Water.
“There are a lot of concerns about Wellington Water, that’s why mayoral taskforce has been set up and there will be an inquiry into Wellington Water”, she says.
Currently less than five per cent of Wellington's water pipes get inspected a year, but Mr Crampton says that’s set to increase.
“Over the next three years we're going to accelerate the amount of condition assessments we do across all over the networks.”
Wellington Water says some issues have been exaggerated by media.
“There have been two unexpected failures which I think we've managed extremely well, all of the other failures have been elevated to a higher level of media interest than they deserve to be.”
Ms Reid disagrees.
“I don't agree at all that there's been too much media attention to this, people need to understand the scope of this and I think Wellingtonians are understanding that we have a city-wide issue and we want to know what the nature of that issue is and what’s our plan out of here.”
Porirua recently got the news it'll cost $1.8 billion to fix its water infrastructure
Wellington Water is expected to inform other Wellington region councils of the predicted cost at the end of this month.
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