Not enough fluoride in water for four months

Wellington Water has not been consistently fluoridating water in Lower Hutt and Wellington without directly informing residents.

The drop in fluoride levels affected residents in most suburbs of Lower Hutt and Wellington since October 2023, and the water supply has failed to consistently meet the target level of fluoride recommended by the Ministry of Health.

In a media release this morning, chief executive Tonia Haskell said “a number of smaller incidents [had] a cumulative impact”.

In November and December the target for fluoride was only met about 50% of the time at the Gear Island plant, supplying most of Lower Hutt and Wellington.

In most months of 2023, fluoridation at Gear Island had not been consistent enough to meet the Ministry of Health target 95% of the time.

The issue would be resolved in the “next few months”, Haskell said, once Wellington Water had sourced suitable pumps from Germany for the Gear Island treatment plant.

“We let people know when we have to turn fluoride off at any of the plants and notify our key stakeholders if an outage has a significant impact on our ability to meet the MoH target levels,” Haskell said.

The following suburbs were not affected by the outage: Stokes Valley, Manor Park, Korokoro, Petone and the northern and western suburbs of Wellington.

In 2022 Wellington Water revealed a fluoride failure which was met by outrage from local leaders and dental health experts.

At that point water was unfluoridated for almost a year and had been patchy dating all the way back to 2016.

A damning independent inquiry into the failure found the issue was treated with a lack of urgency by Wellington Water and there was a culture of “learned helplessness” within the organisation.

Leaders at the time said they were confident Wellington Water would be able to consistently fluoridate the drinking water going forward.

At the same time as announcing it failed to meet the fluoride target, Wellington Water said it remained unable to meet its chlorine target at the Waterloo treatment plant.

Up to 800 properties near Epuni St and Tilbury St in Lower Hutt were receiving water that did not meet chlorine targets.

Wellington Water was denied its request to regulator Taumata Arowai for an exemption from the chlorination rules.

“We let people know when we have to turn fluoride off at any of the plants and notify our key stakeholders if an outage has a significant impact on our ability to meet the MoH target levels...”

Tonia Haskell

Wellington Water