Waste water from 300 homes in Auckland the Red Hills development gets trucked off-site to a pumping station. Video / Jason Oxenham
Hundreds of new homes in Auckland are having sewage trucked away because there is no permanent wastewater connection.
Residents are complaining about the smell, which is expected to get worse heading into summer.
Watercare says the interim solution is to support growth and a permanent connection for homes should be in place by late next year.
Sewage from 300 new homes in West Auckland is going into holding tanks and being trucked to a wastewater pump station because there is no permanent wastewater infrastructure.
Cardinal West is a 470-home development on a former dairy farm at Red Hills on the urban-rural fringe in WestAuckland where 341 homes, 40 of them empty, have been built without permanent wastewater solutions.
Instead, the new homes, selling for $850,000 to $900,000, are connected to temporary tanks at four boarded-up “tank farms” where tankers collect the wastewater and truck it to the Massey North wastewater pump station.
Tankers are working day and night to remove wastewater at Cardinal West because there is no permanent connection. Photo / Jason Oxenham
“It’s like Rotorua but a little bit more potent. It smells like poo,” said one woman, who rents a house with her partner and three children across the road from one of the tank farms.
When the Herald visited Cardinal West on Friday, three tankers came and went from one of the tank farms in one hour.
Seb, who only wanted to be known by his first name and lives opposite a second tank farm, said trucks remove the wastewater day and night.
“It’s tolerable. It is what it is,” said Seb, saying there’s a bad smell whenever the trucks fill up with wastewater but worse when a previous contractor operated a larger tanker.
Seb said when he first moved in around summer it was pretty stinky, but not so bad in winter because the volume of water is greater.
One of the four 'tank farms' at Cardinal West where wastewater is collected before being trucked to Massey North. Photo / Jason Oxenham
“We will have to see what the summer brings. Summer is potentially going to be really bad with the heat and the stench,” he said.
A few doors down from Seb’s house, a new homeowner said: “It’s not a good smell, it’s not nice”, saying he wanted to know when his home would get a permanent connection.
Another resident complained about the noise and vibration from trucks at night.
Andrew Allsopp-Smith, spokesman for the Cardinal West developer Myland Partners, referred questions about the wastewater issue to Watercare.
Watercare head of major developments Mark Iszard said 341 homes were connected to the temporary wastewater solution. Forty of the homes were empty. Tankers were operating between 7am and 6pm, seven days a week, and outside these hours during heavy rainfall. Watercare was operating the tank farms but the developer was covering the costs, Iszard said.
Residents are putting up with the smell from tank farms at Cardinal West. Photo / Jason Oxenham
He said the interim measure was based on consent agreements with the developer to support growth in the area until permanent infrastructure is built, and planned to be in place by late next year.
“We are focused on getting approval to lay the connecting pipeline across private land so work can get underway,” he said.
Henderson-Massey Local Board chairman Chris Carter said Watercare alerted the board about nine months ago about the sewage being held in temporary tanks and trucked away.
“It’s an awkward and difficult situation. The only solution is to get the infrastructure finished. No home should function without a proper septic and wastewater system,” he said.
Carter said there is a financial dispute between Watercare and the developer.
Iszard said: “We have a commercial agreement with the developer and are unable to comment at this stage.”
Waitākere councillor Ken Turner has likened trucking of wastewater to the 'night carts' in Victorian Auckland.
Waitākere councillor Ken Turner said Cardinal West pointed to the naive political belief that delivering more houses solves Auckland’s problems.
“We must slow down intensification until our infrastructure has caught up.
“Trucking wastewater by road is just the old-fashioned night cart going door to door,” he said.
Mayor Wayne Brown declined to comment.
Bernard Orsman is an award-winning reporter who has been covering Auckland’s local politics and transport since 1998. Before that, he worked in the parliamentary press gallery for six years.
