Bruce Bisset: Turning water into whine

Bruce Bisset

Clean water has been something of a cause celebre since the Havelock North gastro crisis two years ago, but while it's important to make sure our drinking water is safe, new standards that enforce chlorination seem to have become the norm whether we need them or not.

Indeed, whether they are NZ Standards, or not. And they aren't.

First the Hastings District and then the Napier City councils reacted to contamination of supply by "reluctantly" introducing chlorine to flush and clean their systems, and in both cases this was sold as a necessary but strictly "temporary" evil.

People were generally prepared to put up with discolouration, odour, and taste issues if it meant cleaning the pipework so we could then go back to plain untreated artesian aquifer water.

Which still exists, as evidenced by the fact the bottling plants down by the seaside didn't so much as pause production. Nor was anyone with a private bore affected.

See, when it comes to nasties in your H2O it's not the source that's at fault here – though the government inquiry seemed confused on this point – it's the distribution network.

And despite the inquiry recommending disinfection (usually chlorination) of supply becomes mandatory, this hasn't happened. The NZ Drinking Water Standards haven't changed since 2008 and almost certainly when they do will not be prescriptive but instead provide guidelines and ask councils to demonstrate how they'll keep public water safe.

That signalled flexibility is where questions start to arise, because Hastings in particular claims permanent chlorine treatment is simply "staying ahead" of mandatory regulatory change whereas no such change may occur.

True, the recently announced "three waters" review could take a stricter line, but that doesn't fit with the "subjective" governance approach we've followed since the Resource Management Act first came in in 1991.

And then there's Christchurch. Our second-biggest city asserted the "temporary cleaning" line in introducing chlorine but, unlike Hawke Bay's cities, has stuck to its promise and is well into the process of phasing it out again.

Add that the Canterbury district officer of health is fine with that and, as the Guardians of the Aquifer group recently asked, if Christchurch can do it, why can't we?

Hastings is doing a lot of work on its water supply including removing the suspect Brookvale bores from the network. And in general there is now no discolouration and the taste and odour issues have disappeared.

In short, job done.

Whereas in Napier, which (lest folk forget) had its own contamination issues, social media remains awash with complaints about dirty ,smelly, foul-tasting water, with repeated widespread incidences.

What that says is that Napier's pipework is too dilapidated thanks to decades of deferred maintenance, including ignoring the (very costly) need to replace the antiquated network on the hills.

Because chlorine only smells and tastes bad when it has work to do – contaminants to kill, that is – and the discolouration evidences that the old iron pipes in particular are not yet "clean", and may never fully be.

Chlorine reacts with and removes iron after all.

Sure, people can install their own filters or choose to fetch de-chlorinated water from council stations, but why should they have to?

Both councils are ducking the big question of why they are continuing the easy option (chlorination) when they were supposedly reluctant to do that even temporarily.

Decouple the pipe maintenance issues and there's no reason either city should not be able to supply pristine, untreated aquifer water to all households.

So come clean, councils, and tell your citizens exactly why you continue to do what you don't need to.