This Dirty Rivers Rafting Tour seems to have taken a turn away from actually rafting or kayaking. Today I was in the Far North looking at the poor old Awanui River - sadly anything but a "Big River" at the moment and pretty much impossible to kayak.
There are two kinds of browning underway in the Far North currently. There is the drought - no serious rain since November. And then there is the Mayor of the Far North District Council, Wayne Brown. Both of them are extremely bad news for the rivers and people of the north.
It is really drying out. The mighty Awanui River which runs through Kaitaia is at its lowest level ever recorded.
Water level gauge bottomed out
I was up there today with people from the Far North Evironment Centre, the Regional Council, Greens, an environmentally minded dairy farmer, and hapū. It has been illuminating for all of us.
We walked along the riverbed in the middle of town, as the remnant river trickled beside us, reduced to a creek.
Kaitaia relies on the Awanui for its drinking water under a consent issued by the Northland Regional Council to the Far North District Council (FNDC) - Kaitaia normally uses about 3.2 million litres a day, a very high rate per person compared to other towns.
But when the Awanui drops below a certain level, Kaitaia's resource consent cuts out to protect the river.
Russel and others concerned with water problems in Kaitaia, from left: Richard Robins, John Kenderdine, Kevin Matthews, Waikarere Gregory, Russel Norman, Abraham Witana and Peter Weising Now you can't have a town with over 5000 people having its drinking water cut, so the Regional Council issued a Water Shortage Direction under the RMA which allows the FNDC to keep extracting water at a rate of 2.6 million litres per day, providing that the FNDC takes measures to conserve water. Under the Direction irrigators are required to stop taking water from the river and the disposal of treated sewerage from the Kaitaia treatment plant must also stop.
The "Big River" reduced to a creek
The FNDC should have been prepared for this as they were told by the regional council in December that drought was on the way and they should start conserving water. So what did they do? Nothing. Until a fortnight ago, commercial car washes continued as normal for example. This is gross negligence of duty. They have finally started to cut consumption and it is now about the NZ average.
The intake for all of Kaitaia's water
The FNDC has failed to invest in upgrading the town's pipes with the result that between 25% and 40% of all water taken from the Awanui simply leaks out through old asbestos pipes. You can see it coming out of drains around the town even today, as it leaks out of the pipes and pours down drains.
And the FNDC failed to ensure that the millions of litres of water stored in the local dam were kept free of toxic algae. So now it can't be used for drinking and there are desperate measures underway to try to get rid of the toxic algae.
FNDC has also failed to develop groundwater supplies to Kaitaia which would provide a much safer alternative. The groundwater is there - Landcorp is currently applying for consent to take 30 million litres of water a day for farming from the aquifer - about ten times more than Kaitaia needs and which, if the FNDC had bothered, could have insured the towns water supply.
So Wayne Brown now says we'll just have to drain the Awanui of water because an entirely predictable, and predicted, event has occurred for which Brown and the FNDC failed to prepare - a drought.
And then there is the sewerage.
Kaitaia sewerage ponds - full and with toxic algal blooms
The Regional Council has directed the FNDC to stop putting its sewerage into the Awanui because the river has very low flows, and hence the sewerage can't be diluted, and the sewerage has a massive toxic algal bloom in it. The FNDC failed to prevent the toxic algal bloom by managing the sewerage ponds properly.
So the sewerage is building up and lapping at the top of the sewerage ponds.
Balls of fat at the edge of the sewerage pond
The pipe from the sewerage ponds into the Awanui River
Actually, as we discovered when we inspected the sewerage outlet today, the FNDC is illegally discharging some sewerage into the Awanui. Have a look at the photos - we reckoned it was about 120 litres a minute.
The people downstream think the sewerage isn't going into the river and they are using it, because that's the public story. This is a patently illegal discharge by the FNDC.
The FNDC should have established a land based disposal system to deal with the sewerage, and in the current crisis they should have used nearby land for a temporary solution, but they have not.
You can see nasty toxic algal bloom oozing into the river
