Northland dairy farmers have reluctantly dumped millions of litres of milk, while in Taranaki progress is being made toward fixing a leaking Maui gas pipeline that closed dairy factories and other businesses this week.
Meanwhile, Fonterra officials said fresh milk supplies were not at this stage affected by the gas leak drama and people would continue to be able to buy milk from supermarkets and dairies.
Vector, which operates the Maui pipeline, said yesterday afternoon gas supplies had been restored to essential services and most of the 15 Fonterra dairy factories north of Taupo that were shut down when their gas was turned off for leak repairs.
However, at mid-afternoon Fonterra told the Northern Advocate gas supplies had not yet been restored to dairy factories north of the Auckland Harbour Bridge.
Staff at Fonterra's Kauri and Maungaturoto plants carried out maintenance work during the unscheduled shutdown yesterday.
With the typical Northland farm milking 300 cows and producing roughly 9000 litres of milk a day, the 979 dairy farmers in the region had about 8.8 million litres of milk to dump yesterday.
Warwick Haywood, manager of Bruce and Julie Paton's Mata farm, had 12,500 litres of milk from 730 cows in the vat and was not relishing the prospect of seeing it go down the drain into irrigation ponds. "The cows are peaking. They are coming in here [to the milking shed] with massive udders and this sort of thing [dumping] makes you ask why you are setting the alarm clock," he said.
At Ruawai dairy farmer Lyall Preston was also reluctant to dump milk. "I can't bear to watch it," he said. "It couldn't happen at a worse time than at the peak of the season. If the dairy factory closed after Christmas we could store a couple of days' milk production in the vats. Now we have to let it go so we can keep milking the cows."
Along with the two dairy factories, other major users of Maui gas in Northland are the oil refinery and the Carter Holt Harvey LVL plant at Marsden Pt and Whangarei Hospital.
Refining New Zealand communications manager Greg McNeill said that when the Maui gas supply stopped the refinery switched to using fuel gas it could take off crude oil during processing and refinery output was unaffected.
Northland District Health Board public relations manager Fleur King said Whangarei Hospital was able to use electricity and diesel power when the gas supply stopped and services were unaffected. She contacted the Advocate about 3.30pm yesterday to say: "Northland DHB now has gas via second pipeline so we are fully operational."
Carter Holt Harvey failed to respond to requests for information about the situation at its LVL plant.
Smaller Northland users of Maui gas included Burger King Whangarei, which was among 41 Burger King restaurants north of Taranaki closed by the halt in gas supplies.
Burger King spokeswoman Rachael Allison, of Auckland, said staff at the restaurants did maintenance work yesterday while the company assessed the situation.