Steve Wiggill, who was project director for the Southern Pipeline from 2016 onwards. Photo / Andrew Warner
In October, after 15 years of debates, headaches and "oh bugger" moments, sewage began flowing through Tauranga City Council's Southern Pipeline for the first time.
Tauranga's biggest poo pipe - the piece of infrastructure that aims to stop leaks of raw sewerage into Tauranga Harbour while running right through it - has been flowing freely ever since.
The project, $107 million in the making, is the biggest Tauranga City Council has ever completed.
Civic issues reporter Samantha Motion talks to some of the key players among the more than 500 people who helped turn a pipe dream into reality - but not without a few nightmares, including a 51,000-year-old log.
"The cost of stopping raw sewage from flowing in the streets of Tauranga could hit $100 million" proclaimed the Bay of Plenty Times.
It was April 2016, a little over a year after work restarted on plans for a new sewer main to redirect wastewater from Tauranga's rapidly expanding southern suburbs to the Te Maunga Wastewater Treatment Plant, easing pressure on its Chapel St counterpart.
The original budget had been around $20m but the scope of the project quickly "grew significantly" according to early leader Graeme Jelley.
Jelley, who retired last year, was an infrastructure planning engineer at the council in the early 2000s and shepherded the project through the early years.
The goal was to enable the city's projected growth in the southern suburbs - including Welcome Bay, Ohauiti, Pyes Pa, Tauriko and The Lakes (not yet even zoned for development) through to 2050.
"It was designed to serve a population the equivalent of Tauranga's population at the time - about 60,000 people," Jelley said.
The original plan took the pipeline over the harbour via the Maungatapu Bridge but had to be abandoned after the issues outweighed the benefits.
"There is no easy road in this business when you are working through a built-up city."
Jelley's leadership role in the project ended when the detailed design work started, but he kept a close eye on progress through to the end.
"It is great to see it completed roughly as we had planned."
Marcel Currin picked up the project in 2005 when he joined the council as a communications adviser.
He recalled the intense debates about the best route and many other aspects of the project but said the biggest lessons were at Matapihi.
"The construction was really tough on that community. Genuine engagement had been done in the preceding years but we should have returned to the community a lot earlier."
The final two years of the project presented a wave of new communication challenges.
"There were many times Steve [Wiggill, project director] would phone me up and say, 'Hi Marcel, were you having a good day?' as an introduction to the next issue we had to grapple with."
But he also found room for a little fun with "Tauranga's biggest poo pipe", including a running joke during the Memorial Park to The Strand walkway proposal (later abandoned) about installing a viewing pane so walkers could see the wastewater flowing beneath their feet.
His main takeaway from the experience?
"Everything is way more complicated and difficult than the Facebook comments would have you believe."
Steve Wiggill joined the project in January 2016, just as the riskiest part of the project - the harbour crossing - was preparing to get under way.
The line would be horizontally drilled at a depth of 35m under the seabed, running 1.5km between Matapihi and Maungatapu.
To ease concerns about the potential for environmental damage if there was a break, a three-layer containment plan was developed.
The outermost layer was 10m-long sleeves diving down into the ground under the harbour.
Inside that, a steel pipe running the full-length housing the final layer, the plastic pipes containing the sewerage - discretely referred to as "flows" by those in the business.
An international team of tunnelling experts - 14 nationalities represented - was contracted to operate the $7m drilling rig.
Still, the crossing was beset by "challenges" that caused months of delays.
The most memorable of the issues was when the reamer hit a 51,000-year-old log, deep under the harbour and far from shore, and got stuck.
Work ceased for a few days while a plan was developed and the repercussions lasted months but were eventually overcome.
In October last year the pipeline was finally made operational, accepting its first streams of flows after a 1000-step commissioning process that took months to plan and 40 people to execute over three days.
Wiggill said there was no cheering, just relief.
He was proud of the work of the team, though they had little to point to and show for it.
"The nature of the job is we bury our work."
In Matapihi, where opposition to the project burned strongest - reaching the High Court at one stage - most have moved on to other issues with the council.
Anaru Timutimu, hapu chairman of Ngāi Tukairangi, said the protests had arisen both due to cultural issues with sewerage pipes being run over Māori land and into the harbour, and because residents could see few benefits of the project to Matapihi.
Eventually, the council agreed to connect three marae and a school in the suburb to the town's wastewater supply.
Greg Milne, chairman of the Matapihi Residents' Association, said while the start of the project had been bumpy and the construction disruptive, he said most people had agreed to it because it was necessary for Tauranga Moana.
Aecom planner Richard Harkness joined the project in 2007 to work on the consents.
Given the significant opposition from Matapihi, he remembered being surprised when the consents went through without an appeal.
Howard Severinson, part of the project management team at the time and the council's current manager of infrastructure delivery, said the lack of appeals and submissions was a "testament to the spadework" of the consultation team.
He said the Southern Pipeline was the "biggest project Tauranga City Council has ever undertaken".
"I spent a few nights at Memorial Park in what felt like freezing cold conditions with my fingers crossed we would overcome whatever hurdle we were facing that day."
Wally Potts, the team leader of drainage services at the council, was positively giddy with excitement when describing the benefits of the new pipeline, alongside his colleagues Peter Gohns and Louis Du Preez.
The connections the pipeline formed between the treatment plants and key pump stations in Maleme St, Judea and Memorial Park had delivered previously unheard of flexibility to move the "flows" - read: sewage - around the city.
Potts' team can decide how much of the flows to move and in which direction, balancing them with other elements that impact the network such as weather and maintenance.
"It's a great piece of kit for the city," he said.
The flexibility allowed the team to baseload the Chapel St plant, maximising that facility's power generation ability.
Potts said the plant generated power from the methane emitted by the organic waste.
His ultimate goal was to generate enough to make the plant energy neutral. The council was starting a study partially funded by Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority into the proposal.
While the goal was a stretch, he was hopeful.
"We can do it."
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