Source: Radio New Zealand
Diggers working at the burnt-out Bromley wastewater treatment plant. Christchurch City Council
Christchurch’s mayor is rejecting locals’ claims his council only acted on the stench from the fire-damaged Bromley wastewater treatment plant after it affected the whole city.
The pong had plagued eastern suburbs since a fire at the plant in 2021, but it got markedly worse this year and wafted over large swathes of the city.
On 2 April councillors backed a $7.7 million plan to add 16 more aerators to the sewage ponds to tackle the smell.
Woolston resident Rebecca Robin said the stench had been a persistent problem for Christchurch’s eastern suburbs since fire damaged part of the sewage plant five years ago.
Locals had long complained about the physical and mental toll it had taken on them.
Robin said while the council now had a plan, it should have come a lot sooner.
“It does seem like solutions only just happened when there’s heaps and heaps of pressure. That’s what it looks like to us; that ideas came out when finally we had enough and when it went out of the bounds of our areas to the greater city,” she said.
But Christchurch mayor Phil Mauger firmly pushed back on that.
“To say that it’s only been sorted out because it smelt over the city, I do not agree with that at all,” he said.
Mauger said the council had already been trying to alleviate the smell.
“We’re doing everything we can to keep those residents as happy as we can. We spent an absolute fortune moving the organics processing plant, we’re spending a small fortune, luckily some of it is insurance money, on the new activated sludge,” he said.
The council’s new aerators plan followed thousands of odour complaints over the summer – including from Wigram 10 kilometres away – and an abatement notice from the regional council.
That led to the mayor proposing to pump about a third of the city’s sewage into the ocean.
But that plan was not recommended by staff and it was hoped the aerators would substantially reduce offensive smells 95 percent of the time.
The aerators were a temporary fix, with a new $140 million sludge system due to be operational in 2028.
Mauger said the council was spending a lot of money on the aerators despite the fact they would have to be written off in a couple of years.
“We’ve said we’ll do it and we’ll do it. God knows what we’re going to do with them after two-and-a-half years because we won’t need them, but we’ve got to do everything we can to keep people as happy as they can be because I have smelt the smell down there,” he said.
Robin found the mayor’s complaints about the cost to be crass.
“That should be one of the last things that should be said in my opinion, especially because people have been suffering for so long,” she said.
Linwood community board member Jackie Simons said she was aware council staff had been working on the problem since the fire.
But she said it was not front of mind until recently.
“We went in every month and told them that the wastewater treatment plant was stinky, but the majority of city councillors didn’t overly worry about it because it wasn’t in their patch,” she said.
“That would be standard for most politicians, they care about their own people, so we did hear a lot more from councillors when people in their constituency started complaining to them.”
Simons said she was pleased councillors had now stepped up to address the problem.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
