Blackwater is a polite word for disgusting stuff; the kind that has been erupting from the drains at a home in Blockhouse Bay.
"Almost like a geyser, pretty horrific," says Aaron Meek, describing the faecal matter, toilet paper and period products left when waters subside.
The worst was on 27 January, in the Auckland Anniversary weekend floods. It's an evening etched in family memory by floodwaters inundating their home.
"The water was just flowing through the bedroom over there, just coming through and it was like, 'get all the buckets out'," says Nicole Brooke-Cowden.
"We were scooping water until like one in the morning," her husband Aaron adds.
Easing waters revealed the awful truth. It hadn't been overland stormwater running through their property. It was blackwater, backing up from the public sewer through the gully traps - those grates next to the wall of your house where pipes let your shower, sink or laundry tub drain greywater into the sewer.
Looking down at his bare hands, Meek is right back in the moment downstairs in the water: "We were like, 'oh my God, time to pump disinfectant'."
Too late. Bailing that toxic soup unawares left their 12-year-old son bedridden for three days with diarrhoea and vomiting.
Then the blackwater surges happened again, in February during Cyclone Gabrielle and once more in May during heavy rains. Three times in just over three months. They'd had a similar but smaller incident a year before. That had been a first in more than fifty years, the lifetime of the home Brooke-Cowden's parents built and that she she grew up in.
"We just want the poos to stop coming up our pipes, basically, that's it, it's not our problem."
Blackwater flooding was not part of her family's history but it threatens their future - and they aren't alone, though they feel left to their own defences.
Watercare owns, runs and charges for Auckland's water. It is offering to pay for a reflux valve, but only if the couple then accepts the ongoing cost of maintaining or replacing it.
"We don't want to pay that cost because it's not our sewage coming up, it's everyone else's, so we feel the onus is on Watercare to actually step up and own it," Nicole Brooke-Cowden explains.
Watercare proposes attaching the valve to a section of the private drain on the property as it's not practical to put it on the public part of the pipe. But, it's a hard line for Watercare that it refuses to have anything to do with the upkeep on a private system.
"If Watercare was to co-ordinate all that work, there would be a pretty high burden of overhead for what is a relatively minor cost that we're talking about," says Watercare's chief operations officer Mark Bourne.
Since the Anniversary floods, Bourne says Watercare has been dealing with about 170 situations where it is investigating the cause of wastewater defects. Some are affecting multiple homes. Some, like this one, causing raw sewage to flow off a property - on to the public path, into a nearby stream and out into the Waitematā Harbour.
"My heart goes out to them, no one should suffer wastewater overflows in their back yard, period."
Bourne says Watercare has investigated the private drains at the couple's home and found them absolutely fault-free. After flushing the public sewer line for buildup and fixing a few minor defects, the wastewater system is working as intended - except in very heavy rain. Then, stormwater somehow is entering pipes never meant to to carry that volume of water - and when it fails it blows back through those gully traps.
Bourne has a plea for all homeowners.
"Take a look at where your downpipe goes. That's collecting the roofwater from your gutter and popping it out. Where's that going? Make sure please, it's not directed to a gully trap because that's stormwater entering the wastewater system. You're probably unaware what impact it has; it probably won't have any impact on your property, but it has huge impacts downstream."
Watercare says the offer to fit a valve is still on the table but it is sticking to its policy of not owning it thereafter, even though it knows the annual maintenance cost might be $200 and it's already spent $2300 so far on cleaning and disinfecting the couple's property.
The family feeling those impacts doesn't understand why it has to pay more than everyone else uphill to get he same level of service from Watercare.
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