Three months before Tukituki runs clean

Central Hawke's Bay District Council is on track to stop sewage discharges into the Tukituki River. Photo / File

It's going to take another three months and $200,000 to stop toxic discharges into the Tukituki River.

Central Hawke's Bay District Council says it is on track to meet a mid-June deadline to fix problems at its wastewater treatment plants, which have been discharging partially-treated sewage into the prominent Hawke's Bay river.

The council is buying new equipment it hopes will solve the filtering problems at the Waipawa and Waipukurau sewerage plants.

The plants are discharging high levels of bacteria and other pollutants into the Tukituki River, in breach of the council's resource consent conditions.

In late January, Hawke's Bay Regional Council issued the district council with abatement notices requiring it to improve the quality of the treated wastewater that leaves the plant so it complied with the consent conditions.

The abatement notices set out a number of steps that have to be met by certain dates as part of "an agreed process and timeframe to rectify the situation," according to a report prepared for the regional council's environment and services committee, which meets tomorrow.

The main method being used to fix the problem involves installing new filtering equipment known as lamella clarifiers which it is hoped will be effective in removing excess organic matter in the sewage.

The unexpectedly high quantity of organic matter being processed has been preventing sand filters at the two plants from operating correctly.

The council was spending about $60,000 buying and refurbishing a secondhand lamella clarifier, which would be be installed at the Waipawa plant. The abatement notice requires it to be installed and operational by May 8.

Once the performance of the Waipawa unit is confirmed, the council is required to install a similar unit at the Waipukurau plant, which must be operational by June 19.

Parts for the Waipawa lamella clarifier had been ordered from overseas, while the body was being constructed locally with the whole unit expected to cost about $150,000. The two units were on schedule to be installed by their respective May and June deadlines, Central Hawke's Bay District Council chief executive John Freeman said yesterday.

"The experts tell us that should solve the problem. It should happen within weeks of them being installed," Mr Freeman said.

The estimated $210,000 additional cost of the clarifiers was "not a bad outcome" to solve the problem, given the council had spent $6.3 million building the two new wastewater treatment plants, he said.

"At the end of the day we're doing everything we can."

Under the abatement notice the district council is also required to commission independent reports from a qualified and experienced wastewater engineer "or equivalent" on the performance of the clarifiers once they are up and running.

A report on the Waipawa installation needs to be with the regional council by July 8, while the Waipukurau report must be furnished by August 19.

Some regional councillors and environmental groups questioned the regional council's response to the consent breach, saying it should have taken immediate action to prosecute the district council.

But in their report to tomorrow's environment and services committee meeting, resource use manager Wayne Wright and resource management group manager Iain Maxwell defended the decision to issue an abatement notice which they said was "more than an 'angry letter' from HBRC".

Mr Freeman also said the regional council's actions were appropriate. "We're all better working together to get the right outcome than we are wasting time and money fighting each other," he said.