COUNCILS PINGED
The Waikato Regional Council initiated 38 enforcement actions on the region’s district councils for unauthorised wastewater discharges over the past five years, new information shows.
The data, released to from the Waikato Regional Council, under the Official Information Act, gave details of the unauthorised wastewater discharges from urban wastewater treatment plants and related wastewater pipes between July 1, 2014-June 30, 2019.
It identified non-compliance and the action taken in response to that non-compliance on both consented and non-consented discharges from wastewater treatment plants.
That action included 24 formal warnings, seven abatement notices, five infringement notices and two prosecutions.
The Waikato District Council topped the list for the most actions taken, with seven formal warnings, four infringement notices and one abatement notice.
The bulk of the Waikato District Council’s offending was historic, occurring from 2014-2016 and involved discharging wastewater to land where it may enter a waterway in Raglan, Matangi, Te Kowhai and in Hamilton City.
Waikato District Council general manager Ian Cathcart said in recent years there has been an increase in community awareness and in turn, efforts by the Council to address wastewater overflows.
‘‘We’ve been working hard and are pleased to report that we’ve had no reports of overflows to sensitive waterways since 2016. We have a goal of reducing overflows as much as practicably possible but acknowledge that it is not possible to completely rule them out due to factors outside our control like weather.’’
He said the community’s help was required to reach this goal because 90 per cent of overflows across the district were caused by human-made blockages that result from people flushing things like sanitary products, wipes and even underwear.
The Hamilton City Council was prosecuted twice over discharging wastewater into water in 2017 and 2018. The 2017 case at Thomas Road included an abatement notice also being issued. The data does not include the
$54,000 fine the Council received last month for discharging 1.782 million litres of wastewater including human sewage into the Waikato River, or the decision by the Waikato Regional Council not to press charges following their investigation into the major sewage spill at Lake Taupo¯ in July.
The Council also received an infringement notice in 2018 for a discharge onto land in 2014 and an abatement notice in 2018 for discharging wastewater onto land at Malcolm Street.
Watercare, the Auckland based company which supplies the water services for that city as well as taking over the Waikato district’s water, wastewater and storm water services from October this year, received a formal warning and an abatement notice for a 2014 incident. At that time, it provided the services for the Tu¯a¯kau and Po¯keno communities. The Taupo¯ District Council received five formal warnings in
2018-2019 for discharging wastewater either to land or directly into water and the Hauraki District Council was formally warned four times and received two abatement notices.
These involved two incidents in May this year where it discharged wastewater onto land at Paeroa. Each incident resulted in two formal warnings and an abatement notice. The Thames Coromandel and Matamata-Piako District Councils each received three formal warnings and the South Waikato District Council and the Rotorua Lakes Council received an abatement notice and formal warning respectively.
The Waikato Regional Council took 102 actions in its compliance monitoring of consented discharges from the region’s wastewater treatment plants. The data showed the outcome of annual compliance audits over the past five years where some degree of non-compliance was identified.
Over that time, the council issued 60 letters of direction, nine abatement notices and 29 formal warnings. The audits revealed 11 occasions of non-compliance with the balance being partial compliance. Waikato Regional Council statutory processes adviser Sarah McLeay said the noncompliance could be for a range of reasons, including the late provision of data or annual reports.
‘‘It should not be inferred from the data that non-compliance was due to failure to meet discharge contaminant limits specified in the consents. You will note that there are some instances of noncompliance where, after review of the circumstances related to the non-compliance, the decision was made that no further action was required.’’