The Wellington sewerage debacle

Radio NZ reports:

An average of around 70 million litres of untreated wastewater has been pouring into the capital’s South Coast since Wednesday morning.

That is a huge amount of wastewater, but also need to put into context that it is equal to a 41 by 41 by 41 metre cube. In terms of the volume of ocean by our coastline, it is enough to make it unsafe to go into, but shouldn’t leave permanent damage.

Wellington’s mayor Andrew Little told Morning Report there must be an independent inquiry into what happened, which he’s labelled a “catastrophic failure” and an “environmental disaster”.

“This is a sewage plant processing the sewage for a big city, and it has completely failed, it just completely stopped,” he said.

“Plants like this should not suffer the kind of catastrophic failure that we’ve seen.”

Sometimes the totally totally unexpected can happen. But in any major plants like that you expect there to be regular and thorough checks of all critical equipment. So it will be very interesting to find out exactly what went wrong, and how preventable was it.