Episode Seven: On today's Viewpoint NZ we're talking about chlorine in our water after black water starting pouring in Napier, affordable housing in one of our most expensive real estate markets, and the inspirational refugee helping others in Christchurch. Made with funding from NZ On Air.
EDITORIAL: It's over. Debate done, surely. Napier will never again have chlorine-free tap water.
A summary of Pattle Delamore Partners' $400,000 report into how the city can get back to unchlorinated tap water contains arguably the most dejecting cost analysis the city's 65,000 residents will ever read.
Pure unchlorinatedwater can be achieved, it tempts.
Just wait 22 years. And invest $295 million.
For all of those who've watched brown filth flow from their taps in the past four years after chlorine was introduced, this feels like a gut punch.
Napier mayor Kirsten Wise says she's determined to consult with the community before deciding if her council should try to go back to chlorine-free water.
But if there's any sense left in the world then the report should have already made up her mind.
The $295m cost is not as outrageously prohibitive as it first looks. The council has to spend at least $178m over the next 20 years to keep its drinking water system up to standard anyway.
The problem is the time frame. Too much can happen in 22 years to justify committing to roll the dice on a $295m unchlorinated water package.
To choose to roll that dice anyway, even as the Government considers taking over responsibility for three waters infrastructure, is the very definition of a bad bet.
It's time to find some positivity in the mess chlorine has created for Napier.
The complaints that flowed thick and fast after it was introduced in 2017 were things like skin irritation, taste and the bursting of already shaky household infrastructure like hot water cylinders.
These complaints have slowly but surely dropped away.
You could mount an argument that, as hard as it was to adjust, our bodies and taste buds have now become somewhat used to chlorinated water.
The dirty water that still flows from the taps, manganese shaken free from ageing pipes by a chemical reaction with chlorine, is something the city will never get used to.
The complaints still trickle in to council, and our newspaper, week after week. It riles people in a way I've never encountered as a journalist.
But, and hear me out here, ageing pipes are a recipe for disaster with or without a manganese and chlorine milkshake flowing through them.
Wellington's have shown this in spectacular fashion this year.
That the manganese is finally prompting Napier to invest in its bores and pipes can only be a good thing for the city's future.
