Author: MIL-OSI Publisher

Source: Radio New Zealand

The Christchurch City Council is yet to clarify how sewage will be treated before being pumped into the ocean under a new plan designed to mitigate the putrid stench coming from Bromley’s damaged sewage treatment plant.

Mayor Phil Mauger confirmed yesterday the council was investigating pumping tens of millions of litres of partially treated and chlorinated sewage into the ocean each day in an effort to combat the smell of the damaged plant.

The council was last week hit with an abatement notice after Canterbury Regional Council received more than 4500 complaints about the odour in the past month.

The plant was damaged by fire in 2021 and eastern suburbs have since been plagued by the foul odour. But other parts of the city have also been hit as it has got markedly worse this year.

RNZ had requested interviews with Mauger, city council staff and councillors representing affected areas, but none had responded.

Christchurch City Council was yet to answer questions on how the sewage would be treated before being pumped to the ocean and how long such a measure would be in effect.

Community leaders and Canterbury Regional Council have been caught on the hop by Mauger’s announcement yesterday.

Local community board deputy chair Jackie Simons only heard of the proposal yesterday.

“This isn’t unusual,” she said.

“It’s not good enough. I should have known that this was in the winds weeks ago.

“I have people asking me questions about this before I have the information and as the elected representative that’s not a good thing. But at the same time, I do respect my council colleagues and council staff and what they are trying to do. I know that they are pulling out everything they can to try and resolve the situation.

“It’s uncomfortable for everyone and the fact that I don’t get information ahead of time – it’s frustrating.”

Simons said she was cautiously optimistic about the plan, but she had concerns.

“There’s a lot of gaps. There’s a lot of information that hasn’t come through because it’ll be very detailed and very complex,” Simons said.

“I’ve said I’m cautiously optimistic. I have concerns about it being discharged into our ocean because our ocean is literally not for that purpose. So I’m concerned about any harmful repercussions from discharging it to the ocean and I’m well aware that it has the potential to create problems along our coastline for people and for marine life.

“At the same time I’m also dealing with a situation that has gone on for many years in the suburb of Bromley where our people are traumatised by ongoing odour.

“There’s also younger people, and adults of course, who are having some fairly severe health impacts and it’s a very fine line to actually balance out doing something for the people without destroying our marine life. So cautiously optimistic is the word because I want our people to be better and to be able to get on and start living their lives.

“It’s not an ideal solution by any means. But at this state in time what else do we have? I can’t see that we have any other solution.”

Canterbury Regional Council director operations Brett Aldridge said he had many unanswered questions about the plan.

“We had some very high level discussions around what the mayor proposed but only in a conceptual sense and so we were pretty surprised yesterday with the city coming out saying they were in consultation with us,” he said.

“In saying that we do have a planned meeting and we will sit down and work through the proposal in a lot more detail. But at this stage we really don’t have much more detail than what the mayor announced yesterday.”

Among the regional council’s unanswered questions was what partially treating the sewage meant.

Aldridge said they were very interested in finding out what that process would look like.

However he was certain it would not result in Christchurch facing a similar situation to Wellington, where about 70 million litres of wastewater was pumped into the ocean off the capital daily after its Moa Point wastewater treatment plant failed.

“That would be a categoric no – I don’t think so at all,” Aldridge said.

“We are not in the same emergency situation that Wellington is and we really would work through what’s being proposed and what are the mitigations that are going to be required to get it out there in a state that the effects are going to be well managed and mitigated.”

Canterbury Regional Council would meet with Christchurch City Council on Wednesday to discuss the proposal.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

• Seven weeks of weeding work at Lake Horowhenua has finished
• More than 400 tonnes of invasive weeds collected
• No easy fix for lake that for decades had sewage pumped into it.

Raw sewage was pumped into Punahau Lake Horowhenua for decades, earning it the dubious reputation as one of New Zealand’s most polluted waterways.

A years-long cleanup project is now working to restore it back to health, although it is not possible to yet put a timeframe on when the lake, west of Levin, will be safe to swim in again.

A special harvester has operated there for the past five summers, chopping out invasive weeds to give native species the chance to flourish, and replenish the oxygen-deprived water.

Mowing the lake

It was a crisp but calm day when RNZ visited Lake Horowhenua and headed out on the water on the paddle steamer-like $300,000 harvester – one of two in New Zealand.

Skipper Julian Everth explained how it worked.

“You have one horizontal set of teeth, which cuts horizontally, and then two vertical ones. And as you’re going along the weed gets cut out in a chunk.

“That comes out on a conveyer belt and then lands on another conveyer belt by your feet. Once it’s full there you can shift the conveyer belt backwards more and load more on to the boat.”

Over the past seven weeks Everth and another skipper have operated the harvester for 12 hours a day – mowing the 390-hectare lake bed in a grid pattern. Tuesday was their last day this summer.

They will collect more than 400 tonnes of weed, and the odd creature too.

“We gets lots of little perch and carp. They’re both invasive species, so we’re not too worried about them.

“Occasionally we will get eels that will swim up on to the harvester. When that happens we stop the cutting process, pull backwards a little bit and allow them to swim off.”

While the lake was safe for aquatic life, it was not recommended for humans due to the bacteria it contained.

The harvested weed was scooped into a truck and taken to Feilding for composting, rather than rotting in the lake.

“Essentially, it uses up lots of nutrients in the lake to grow. Eventually it will die and collapse,” Everth said.

“You end up with a blanket of dead weed on the bottom of the lake. When that happens it rots and makes an anoxic environment. A lot of the fish and eels can’t survive in that.”

Lake still getting poisoned – guardian

Tangata tiaki Deanna Hanita-Paki said the lake was for a long time a receptacle for effluent runoff, pesticides and worse.

“Back in the 1950s and 60s the council started putting raw sewage straight into the lake. That stayed like that until about 1985.

“They’ve had years of polluting – raw sewage straight into the lake.”

Lake trustees fought court battles to halt this, but their win took years and the effects of the pollution were devastating, Hanita-Paki said.

But the iwi Muaūpoko and the Horizons Regional Council were now putting much effort into nursing the lake back to life.

“It’s a lot better. With the harvester being there we can see the water’s getting better – the quality of that water was getting better and so was the weed changing, and our creatures were coming back.

“Our fish were coming back – same with the eels.”

But it was not perfect, as stormwater was still routed there.

“We’ve found that on those weather events the lake starts to smell and it smells different.

“I go out every month. We do water testing with Horizons. It started changing about October, November last year. The smell inside the lake was really bad.”

She said as far as she was concerned, the lake was still being poisoned due to toxins in the stormwater.

Weeding part of the plan

Horizons Regional Council fresh water and projects manager Logan Brown said lakes were complex.

“There is no silver bullet for restoration of Lake Horowhenua. There are lots of little projects that go together and they piece together.

“For all lakes across the country when we’re doing restoration you have to do both in-lake interventions and catchment interventions.”

A wetland project would also begin shortly, while the weed harvester was about to get a deep clean and then go into storage ahead of next summer.

“I like to compare it to a lawnmower. Effectively, we’re mowing the weed of the bottom of the lake,” Brown said.

“We’re not trying to get rid of all the weed. Like cutting your lawn, you leave the lawn there for stability.

“We want the aquatic plants to stay on the lake bed. That helps with stability. We get really high winds here and it just stops that stirring up on the lake bed.”

The lake is only as deep as 1.8 metres now due to silt build-up down the years.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

The Department of Conservation (DOC) has floated a whale back out to sea after it stranded on Auckland’s St Heliers Beach.

The Shepherd’s beaked whale was spotted at Ladies Bay this morning.

DOC operations manager Bec Rush said the whale had a health check and was then refloated as the tide was rising about 3.30pm

“However, it is possible the whale will re-strand overnight, and we will be monitoring for if this happens.”

Shepherd’s beaked whale strandings are semi-regular in New Zealand, said Rush, and they are occasionally seen live at sea, with reports from offshore Taranaki, Gisborne, Kaikoura, Otago, and Fiordland.

Project Jonah spokesperson Louisa Hawkes said Shepherd’s beaked whales lived in the deep sea, and only came up to shore if something was wrong.

Stranded, injured or dead whales should be reported to the DOC emergency hotline 0800 DOC HOT (0800 362 468).

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

The family of a young man shot and killed by a hunter on Stewart Island last year say the hunter’s failure to identify his target has left them facing a “lifetime of hell”.

Ashburton builder Paul William John Stevens, 39, has avoided jail time and instead been sentenced to five months’ home detention for shooting Jock Davies, 21, last July.

He had earlier pleaded guilty to a charge of careless use of a firearm causing death.

At the Invercargill District Court on Tuesday, Judge Russell Walker ordered Stevens to make $20,000 in reparation payments, split equally between a scholarship in Jock Davies’ name for West Otago students and a New Zealand Deerstalkers Association hunter safety course.

Davies’ mother Sarah Davies told the court she never anticipated her son, who was a cancer survivor, would not return from the week-long much-anticipated hunting trip with his father and brothers.

“I miss Jock every day, I miss the twinkle in his eye, his naughty sense of humour. I miss his laughter, the way he used to light up a room. I miss his resilience, his kindness and I miss him leaving the lights on. Jock was one special human,” she said.

Davies’ oldest brother George Davies told Stevens that he had failed as a firearms licence-holder and the family was facing “lifelong effects” as a result.

He spoke of the trauma of seeing his brother after the shooting.

“The impact of having to carry my dead brother up the hill to rescuers is something I will have to live with forever, it’s something no-one should have to do. It was meant to be a trip of a lifetime which turned into a lifetime of hell,” he said.

Davies’ brother Tom Davies described the eight months since the death as a “living nightmare”.

“I’ve found myself in a dark hole where I didn’t know what was right or wrong anymore. It has been a battle to leave the house some days,” he said.

Jock Davies had been intending to join him in Christchurch at teachers’ college and it left a “huge ache” in his heart and soul to know that would not happen, he said.

“I’m trying my absolute hardest to be there for my family as we navigate a new way of life,” he said.

Davies’ father Peter Davies said his son had touched many lives, with his funeral attended by more than 1000 people.

“As a dad there should have been so many more proud moments, but now there’s only memories,” he said.

Stevens sat quietly, crying, as the victim impact statements were read to the court.

His lawyer Grant Fletcher told the court that Stevens, a father of two, could not possibly regret his actions more.

“He would do anything to make it right but obviously he can’t,” he said.

“He’s offered his most heartfelt, most sincere, most genuine remorse and regret.”

Reading from a summary of facts, Judge Walker said Stevens and Davies were part of the same group of eight people on the week-long trip, hunting in the South Lords River block.

The group split up on the morning of 6 July and Davies was dropped off from a dinghy, while Stevens and another associate went in the opposite direction to hunt.

Stevens told police the terrain was “gnarly and hard-going,” he said.

“You said you were not used to hunting in such thick and challenging bush.”

Stevens heard a shuffling noise 20 metres away and saw a “dark shadowy image”, he said.

“Confident it was a deer and not wanting to miss the opportunity, you chambered a round in your rifle and fired a single telescopically-aimed shot,” he said.

“You aimed for what you believed was the neck area of the deer.”

A rescue helicopter was dispatched at about 11am but when it arrived two hours later Davies was dead, he said.

Judge Walker found Stevens’ actions to show a “medium-to-high level of carelessness”.

Stevens “would and should have been well aware of the dangers of hunting” but did not attempt to sight the deer with his own eyes, he said.

“The terrain was challenging for you to the extent that you discussed turning back. You were clearly aware that others would have been in the area,” he said.

He found Stevens’ remorse to be genuine and said Davies’ death would have a life-long impact.

“I accept the mental health impact that this has had and will continue to have upon you. It is rightly described as profound,” he said.

From a starting point of 18 months’ imprisonment, Walker deducted eight months for mitigating factors and converted the resulting 10 months’ imprisonment into five months’ home detention.

He also ordered the forfeiture of Stevens’ rifle and ammunition.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand