Costs double for water treatment plant upgrade
UK-born reporter was pumped about giving blood after restrictions born from fears over “mad cow disease” were lifted. But the donation didn’t go to plan.
The Black Caps performance out in the middle might have been poor but there were plenty of political hangers-on at the cricket on Thursday and yesterday.
The sun came out and a sellout waited for the Black Caps to finish off the Australian tail.
It took over two hours and 120 odd runs. It wasn’t great.
On Thursday both BusinessNZ boss Kirk Hope and his counterpart from the Council of Trade Unions Richard Wagstaff were in attendance.
Asahi is a significant sponsor of the Black Caps through their Boundary Road Brewery brand, so as you’d expect plenty of Asahi government relations types were in town. And there were plenty of the good and the great in the ANZ hospitality area, not least of which was new head of government relations Jessica MutchMcKay.
It was also a battle of the ex-chiefs of staff with both Wayne Eagleson, the very successful chief of staff to Sir John Key and Sir Bill English and Andrew Kirton, the chief of staff to the less successful Chris Hipkins, in attendance.
Wellington local and keen cricketer Chris Bishop was in attendance as was new Insurance Council boss, Kris Faafoi.
Looking chilled out, Sir Ashley Bloomfield made an appearance on the bank in what appeared to be Birkenstocks, while I took in some sun, tapping away on the embankment.
As always, there were plenty of colourful and gaudy blazers, red faces and prosperous paunches.
Some chaps dressed up as cops, and a lot of beige shirts.
We would say that the only disappointment was New Zealand’s performance at the cricket, but given the heavy preponderance of Australians in the crowd that wasn’t universally the case.
An upgrade of the water treatment plant, which provides 45% of the region’s drinking water, was originally approved in December of 2021 with a budget of $44.5 million.
However, this was increased to $88.3m in September last year.
The plant is designed for a maximum plant flow of 140 million litres of drinking water per day (MLD), however, is currently limited to 80 MLD under specific raw (untreated) water conditions.
The upgrades are designed to allow the plant to provide a larger amount of water to meet the needs of the region, while also improving the plant’s ability to remove algae, sediment, and odour from the water.
A paper presented to Greater Wellington Regional Council on Thursday noted the project was considered “off track” and had “significant issues” requiring governance intervention.
“Completion of the Te Mārua capacity upgrade project is required to return the region to within the target level of service for drought resilience,” the report noted.
“Higher costs are forecast for Te Marua Water Treatment Plant (TMP) due to scope increase and fast tracking of various works.”
Greater Wellington corporate services group manager Julie Knauf said the scope of the project had been change to cover “critical equipment”. “Additional costs arose due to changes to requirements for addressing seismic risk (this relates to a national change to seismic risk guidance, issued by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment) at the Water Treatment Plant.”
In addition, the project had faced budget cost pressures, including the substantial increase in building material and labour costs post-Covid, which affected the construction industry as a whole, she said.
Knauf said the increased cost was budgeted for this financial year (2023/24) and into the next financial year, noting that the budget allocated for 2024/25 was subject to final Long Term Plan approval by council.
The report noted the higher costs for the project were offset by an underspend in Metlink driven by National Ticketing System project being reclassified as
Julie Knauf
Greater Wellington corporate services group manager
“Additional costs arose due to changes to requirements for addressing seismic risk (this relates to a national change to seismic risk guidance, issued by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment) at the Water Treatment Plant.”
operational expenditure.
The plant upgrade project is currently one month behind schedule, with an estimated completion date of March next year.
Ihaven’t been able to donate blood in New Zealand for the majority of my 28 years. I was born in the UK, and between October 1995 and December 1996 I lived in Billericay – a commuter town about 45km east of London, in the Essex countryside. This being in the midst of Britain’s BSE or “mad cow disease” crisis, donating blood was off the agenda.
So when the restrictions on anyone present in Britain, Ireland and France between 1980 and 1996 were lifted this week, I leapt at the opportunity to be one of the first in the queue.
It was all going well. I filled out all the forms, ticking “no” to most of the boxes and treating it as a mere formality.
I was then led to a one-on-one interview with a nurse ... and that’s where it all fell apart.
A hangnail on my left index finger had gotten a bit out of hand a few days prior, and there was a cut below my nail. That wound was too fresh to donate blood, and donating plasma required another appointment.
Am I disappointed? A bit. But New Zealand has one of the safest supplies of donated blood in the world, and even a bit of bad luck can mean getting turned away.
I’ve gone from being a writeoff to a viable donor. And that is quite special. Others who were there felt the same.
Kelvin James was donating blood for the first time in over two decades, thanks to five years he spent in Britain between 1978 and 1983.
“I started teaching in 1989, and the Blood Service would often come down to the school. I used to do it because it was a good thing to do. You didn’t have to think about it, and it got you out of the classroom.
“Then all of a sudden they said, ‘No, you can’t do it any more’.”
James was relaxed about the act itself, watching the cricket in his chair as the needle went in.
Fiona Cockerill-Ghanem was very keen to donate. Having been disallowed since returning from the UK in 2006, she’d booked as soon as she could.
She never worried much about the mad cow outbreak at the time. “I knew it was quite a rare thing, so I still ate beef in the UK. It was on my mind a bit, but the chances of getting it were so minimal.
“I knew I couldn’t donate, so I’ve been watching and watching over the years. As soon as I got the email it’d been lifted, I booked in and got my space.”
How did we get here?
The ban dates back to the UK’s Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy outbreak, more commonly known by the acronym BSE or mad cow disease. It’s a progressive brain condition that causes cows to struggle with coordination and exhibit abnormally aggressive or fearful behaviour.
In the mid-1980s, the first cases in Britain were identified, on a farm in Sussex, thought to have been caused by the now-banned feeding of meat-and-bone meal to cattle herds. From there, it began to spread.
By 1987, the British Government accepted that there was an outbreak, sparking a consumer panic with many households. It maintained that British beef was safe to eat, under the belief that the illness could not jump species.
One of the more famous moments of the crisis was in 1990, when then-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs John Gummer tried to feed his reluctant 4-year-old daughter Cordelia a beef burger on camera. Gummer instead took a bite, declaring British beef to be “completely safe”.
It wasn’t until 1994 that it was discovered this wasn’t the case. The human form of the disease, called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or vCJD, began to spread, too.