New battlefield for snaking Waikato water pipeline

By BERNARD ORSMAN

The controversial Waikato River water pipeline is snaking its way to Auckland, past the site of a historic Maori Land War battle and into an on-running skirmish about its environmental benefits.

The pipeline has just been laid alongside the Presbyterian Church at Pukekohe East, where 17 local settlers defended themselves against a Maori war party of 200 in September 1863.

Supporters believe the pipeline will safeguard Auckland against the kind of drought that almost led the city to run dry in 1994. Opponents believe water conservation would be better than spending $155 million on the giant pipeline, which will run 38km from an intake on the Waikato River at Whangarata near Tuakau to a reservoir at Redoubt Rd in Manukau.

Work started in September on laying the 1.2m steel and concrete-lined pipeline along roads, 27 private rural properties and over the Bombay Hills to Manukau. About 10km has been laid and the remaining 28km is due to be finished by July.

Once a water treatment plant at Whangarata is completed and the Medical Officer of Health approves the water quality, the Waikato River is due to start flowing to Auckland in the middle of next year.

But environmentalists are upset that once it reaches Manukau, water from the Waikato River will be mixed with water from Auckland's dams for daily consumption and not just as an emergency back-up. The Waikato will initially provide about 20,000 cu m of the city's daily 330,000 cu m of water, rising to about 150,000 cu m within 10 years.

Waikato water will be used even if dams from the catchments in the Hunua and Waitakere Ranges are overflowing.

Greater Auckland's water retailer, Watercare Services, concedes that raw water quality from the Auckland dams is better than raw water quality from the Waikato River.

But Watercare maintains that it has gone to enormous lengths to build a multibarrier treatment system at Tuakau that will remove all pathogens, hormones and other chemical substances. A feature of the treatment system is a membrane filtration system with microscopic pores to screen out bugs such as giardia and cryptosporidium.

An American expert in drinking water treatment, John Gaston, who was hired by Watercare, said last year that treated water from the Waikato would be of the best quality in Auckland.

Watercare spokesman Mathew Bolland said yesterday that regional demand was increasing about 3 per cent a year, the region's population had grown more than the size of Dunedin since the 1994 drought and the best conservation efforts would not deter the impact of another drought.

Mr Gaston said: "The last dam to be built in Auckland was the Upper Mangatangi in the Hunuas in the 1970s. There hasn't been a significant increase in the available water supply for a quarter of a century."

The pipeline would also allow Watercare to carry out much-needed repairs on Cosseys Dam in the Hunua Ranges.

A longtime opponent of the pipeline and member of the Watercare Shareholders' Group, North Shore councillor Dr Joel Cayford, believes water conservation measures could have deferred the huge expenditure on the pipeline.

And a local engineer, Clive Pinfold, believes Auckland should have charged people the true cost of water, fixed leaking networks and followed New York City, which spent $873 million giving away free water-efficient toilets which reduced its daily water demand by 7 per cent.

"These options, however, require visionary and informed leadership. It is not engineers but politicians who should be solving these water problems.'