I ask because I’ve spent the past 24 hours fighting the urge to wave this away as one of those unfortunate, unforeseen things that just happen from time to time. You know — mistakes happen.
I’m glad I resisted that urge, because the latest information actually makes the situation far more concerning.
The Moa Point facility is run by a private contractor, Veolia, and there have been years of warnings that it was non-compliant. Since January 2024 — two years ago — it has failed to meet compliance every single month except for two. That’s a pretty poor record. The issues have included inappropriate discharges, odour problems, and repeated problems involving faecal bacteria.
A review three years ago looked across all four water‑treatment plants Veolia runs in the Wellington region and found understaffing, inexperienced operators, and frontline teams being left to handle complex problems without executive support.
Now, we don’t yet know exactly what went wrong with the pipe yesterday. We don’t know whether the long-running warnings had anything to do with the incident — whether, had the warnings been acted on, this might not have happened. We simply don’t know.
But what we do know is that what was happening at that facility wasn’t good enough.
And that brings me to our default reaction — mine, yours, everyone’s — which seems to be giving councils a free pass. I don’t know why we do that. Maybe it’s because we’re fair-minded people and try to be accommodating of others’ mistakes. Maybe it’s because councils are monopolies; if we don’t like what they do, we have nowhere else to turn, so what’s the point getting upset?
So we end up lowering our standards to match the councils’ low standards.
But we shouldn’t.
Wellingtonians should be angry about this — just as Christchurch residents should be angry about the Bromley stench that has dragged on for years.
Voting for “more competent” people probably won’t fix it. It never does. What Wellingtonians, and everyone else, can do — and what the media can do — is get angry, get vocal, and shame the councils and their contractors into doing better.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show. This article was sourced from Newstalk ZB.
10 comments:
If a diary farms effluent system failed and discharged raw effluent into a river or the sea the condemnation would be instant and the fine in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly higher. As well as name and shame. A double standard?
No sympathy. Wellingtonians get what they voted for: incompetence, rates increases, rainbow toilets and cycle infrastructure.
Councils master the art of incompetence and Wellington Water is the epitome of incompetence
"one of those unfortunate, unforeseen things that just happen from time to time. You know — mistakes happen."
This seems to be typical of what happens in New Zealand over the last 20 years or so.
Disasters occurring when there were multiple warning sings or red flags.
For example:-
White Island. (I lived in the Tauranga/Mount and it was very common knowledge that you could sail past White Island, but NEVER land there. ) It is an active volcano with bubbling white hot lava.
Pike River mine. A methane gas ridden mine waiting for a spark to explode..
Cave Creek. A viewing platform that was not properly bolted down.
Landslide at the Mount, killing six people.
And now - Moa point sewerage breaking down.
HELLO !!! Do we never learn?
NZ seems slow to see risk. Nowadays everyone waits to be paid a consultant fee to consider. The effect of slash on bridges, the power cable in Auckland, Manawatu Gorge, Hawkes Bay sub station low level in flood plain, sundry dam collapses, Edgecombe stop bank, recent quake failure of modern buidings, HT line vulnerability, ferry faikures etc. Incidentally it was not so long ago when raw sewage was discharged there anyway (and at west side of harbour entrance.What became of the milliscreen plant? I wonder what the Ngawi fishermen are doing. Less senationalism and more objectivity in msm reporting would be welcome.
Wellington and Queenstown, both have in common fractured and underperforming sewage systems spilling raw effluent into waterways , and Veolia as the operator.
"You know — mistakes happen." Like the passing of a 1975 Act about the Treaty - BIG MISTAKE!
'Veolia is a French transnational company with activities in three main service and utility areas traditionally managed by public authorities.'
Why do we need to outsource so much to non-New Zealand companies. Have New Zealanders really become so useless and incompetent?
We do have a lovely new library , that coincidentally had to be rebuilt ?? Also we need to upgrade the town hall as we are really short of venues ,,we have to prioritise can’t everyone see that ?
Veolia is not the problem, they maintain the network but the money comes from the council. You can’t fix stuff on a shoestring. Wellington council regularly cut the funding to Water services and redirect it to other useless stuff.
Ms Genter and others have advocated for cycleways etc to save the environment. My question is, how does 70 million litres of turds spilling into the Wellington Harbour save the environment?
The Wellington voters got what they asked for they can now deal with the environmental fallout.
It’s tough being Green but being an idiot is even tougher.
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