Treated water is good enough to ... drink

Central Hawke's Bay District councillor Terry Story (left) looks on as fellow councillor Mark Williams drinks water processed through Waipawa's recently-upgraded sewage treatment plant.

Central Hawke's Bay District Council is drinking to the success of Waipawa's newly-improved sewage processing plant - literally.

Councillor Mark Williams drank water processed through the plant, during a site visit last week, in a bid to highlight the council's faith in work it has carried out to bring the facility up to an acceptable environmental standard.

In January, Hawke's Bay Regional Council served abatement notices on the district council, requiring it to fix problems with toxic discharges flowing into the Tukituki River from its Waipawa and Waipukurau waste treatment plants.

The council is spending about $200,000 on filtering equipment and other improvements to bring the discharges up to the standard required under the plants' resource consents.

Central Hawke's Bay Mayor Peter Butler said the new filtering process was fully functional at the Waipawa plant and was "working better than all expectations", while a similar upgrade at Waipukurau was being tweaked for optimal performance.

Under the terms of the abatement notice, the council had to have the two filter systems up and running by June 19.

It then had to provide independent reports on their respective performances to the regional council, with the Waipukurau report due by August 19.

Mr Williams said downing some of the discharge, when councillors visited the Waipawa plant as part of a field trip last Thursday, was a case of "showing faith in our technical services manager Steve Thrush and his crew", who have overseen the upgrade project.

Mr Williams said he had experienced no ill-effects from the drink.

"It had been through the whole system," he said.

"The girls there told me I would start having mood swings because they haven't taken the estrogen out of it. But I haven't had one of those yet and there have been no other signs that I've noticed."

While the council had faced strong criticism for polluting the river, monitoring showed toxin and chemical levels in the discharge, including phosphorous, were now well below the limits set in the consent, he said.