Sand mining opponents take battle back to court

Local fears the mining will cause beach erosion. Photo / Paul Estcourt

Sand-mining opponents have appealed to the High Court in their battle to halt dredging near the beach at Pakiri and Mangawhai on the east coast of Northland.

Friends of Pakiri Beach and the Auckland Regional Council are appealing against an Environment Court decision which in June 2006 extended permits for mining near the shore at Pakiri for 14 years.

This overturned an earlier ARC decision to deny an application from McCallum Bros and Sea Tow for permission to take 76,000cu m of sand a year in water 5m to 10m deep.

The ARC accepted evidence that the resource was not replenished naturally by sea currents, and that continued extraction from near the shore would lead to or worsen coastal erosion.

But the Environment Court took a different view.

It found the breakdown of shells in the 25km-long Mangawhai-Pakiri embayment contributed 90,000cu m of sediment a year to the quantity of sand to offset the effects of mining.

It also accepted the companies' evidence that despite 85 years of extraction, no significant erosion or change to the coastline could be blamed on dredging, and that no other efficient sources of quality sand were available to Auckland construction projects.

The Environment Court also ordered monitoring which McCallum Bros says is the most extensive for any beach in New Zealand.

Lawyers for the Friends of Pakiri told the High Court at Auckland last week that errors of law took away the foundation for the decision.

Nicholas Davidson QC said much of the case turned on scientific evidence.

Some errors were related to findings based on "unfounded speculation masquerading as expert hypothesis" or where no evidence existed to support the finding. Some findings flew in the face of available evidence.

For the ARC, lawyer Andrew Green said the case was about the sustainability of the mining.

He asked for the matter to be sent back to the Environment Court for reconsideration on the basis of a revised calculation which reconciled experts' conflicting evidence.

This covered the contribution of shell breakdown materials to the "box", or sand resource area, assuming that the outer limit of the box was a depth of 25m.

Justice Raynor Asher reserved his decision.

The appeal parties could not introduce new evidence at the hearing.

The Mangawhai Harbour Restoration Society has complained to the ARC that erosion over 18 months along the beach threatened the breeding area of the endangered fairy tern and the stability of the sandspit.

It said sand lost at Pakiri in a year was equivalent to 50 times the amount used to restore Kohimarama Beach in Auckland City.

The ARC said erosion along the beach was likely from extreme storms in July 2007 and last July, and was consistent with low beach levels recorded in ARC coastal monitoring of other east coast beaches.