ORC in panic mode as QLDC sewer crisis escalates
Officials circulate misleading "proof" of safe discharges
This week the Friday Edition is fully focussed on the rapidly developing sewage crisis in Queenstown and attempts by the regulator, the ORC, to justify their lack of enforcement action. We believe this situation will not only cost local ratepayers hundreds of millions of extra dollars but irrevocably tarnish our reputation due to local authorities tying to cover up a mess of national proportions, entirely of their own making.
Crux and elected Otago Regional Council councillors were sent 100% irrelevant and misleading data by ORC managers earlier this week as false “proof” that the QLDC’s Shotover sewer plant was not spiralling out of control.
Here’s the key points of this extended Crux investigation report.
QLDC is only consented by ORC and national water regulations to discharge liquid treated sewage within the Shotover disposal field fence (into the ground) of 260 (two hundred and sixty) e coli units or less.
An e coli unit is the number of colony forming units (CFU’s) per 100 millilitres of water.
Auckland beaches get closed if sewage in the water reaches 550 e coli units. This is a national standard for high public health risk water.
No liquid sewage (treated or not) is allowed to be discharged from the Shotover disposal field, outside the field fence. Throughout November 2024 (and much of this year) liquid sewage was being discharged illegally by QLDC beyond the fence via a permanent pipe towards both the Kawarau and Shotover Rivers.
On December 27 and 28, 2023 ORC investigators measured liquid waste escaping from the Shotover plant disposal field fence with an e coli unit count of 38,000 (third eight thousand) units on December 27 and December 28 of 41,600 (forty one thousand six hundred) units. Investigators say this waste would have reached the Kawarau River, albeit at lower e coli levels.
On January 25, 2024 ORC investigators discovered wastewater overflowing from the eastern boundary fence of the disposal field with an e coli count of 5,000 (five thousand) units.
On February 21 2024 ORC investigators were on site at the Shotover plant when a newly constructed QLDC emergency containment earth bank - or bund - around the disposal field “suddenly and completely failed.”
The February 21 sewage from the burst bank escaped towards the Twin Rivers cycle trail and was measured at 2,500,000 (2.5 million) e coli units. Another measurement of the same water by ORC counted “feacal coliforms” at 3,500,000 (3.5 million) units.
On March 3 2024 ORC was informed by a member of the public of a “burst pipe” at the Shotover disposal field. The incident was in fact a second, separate collapse of the QLDC containment bank. ORC has not published e coli data for this discharge.
The QLDC emergency containment bank was built illegally by QLDC (2023/2024) without notifying ORC as the regulator and without the required resource consent.
QLDC councillors, CEO and managers were informed in a March 2023 report from consultants Beca that the Shotover disposal field was not functioning, might not be fixable and in any case the repair work (not yet started in December 2024) would take three years or more even if the ORC granted resource consent.
Today the ORC released only limited water testing result to Crux and ORC councillors from a November 20th 2024 test (when Crux first highlighted the ongoing problems) - the results show e coli units as being only “less than 1,000.”
The full story. A Crux Investigation.
Crux first became alerted to what now appears to be a near constant release of partially treated sewage into local rivers by QLDC on January 15, 2024.
A stream of effluent was flowing across the Shotover delta access road by Pond 3, the third of the main ponds visible from State Highway 6. We calculated the flow at around 3 litres per second.
We now know that this incident, which we thought was a one off and of great importance, was in fact so routine as not to be even mentioned or measured in the Otago Regional Council abatement notice of March 18, 2024.
QLDC comms staff dismissed the incident saying they were confident the discharge - which lasted for a day and a half - had simply soaked away and not entered the Shotover River.
Video. January 15, 2024. Sewage overflows from Pond 3 towards the Shotover River.
What we did not know on January 15 was that this was just one of many overflows that QLDC has known about for years.
In fact sewage has been flowing into the Kawarau and Shotover rivers for years before the new disposal field was built in 2019. It was supposed to fix the problem.
Instead it made things worse - much worse.
This is how it was supposed to look and work.
A number of large buried baskets - or water cells - were supposed to filter partially treated water that drained through them into the ground. This is a land disposal system favoured by Iwi who oppose sewage discharge into water or rivers and who also expressed a preference for a gravity fed system - not a pressure fed system.
Drain and dose is the system that references draining into the land and the “dose” refers to distribution pipes that feed liquid waste into the cells in a timed pattern so that the drainage has a chance to take place, using gravity.
So - what went wrong?
Its a long list but here’s the main reasons the disposal field started to fail quite quickly - and for some time (perhaps years) has not worked at all.
The water did not drain through the field. The ground was too hard - compacted river silt. Some of the engineers, consultants and experts spoken to by Crux say that the initial design and the lack of proper geo tech surveys were to blame.
Very quickly the field started to get blocked it was assumed by river silt and sediment.
Crux has spoken to multiple engineers who say the real reason for the blockage was discovered around 18 months after completion.
It was solid human waste.
This was much more serious than it sounds (and it sounds bad enough) because the entire plant is designed so that zero solid waste makes it past pond 3.
Solid waste beyond pond 3 means the entire plant is not working.
There is a UV sterilisation plant between pond 3 and the disposal field but it can’t treat solids nor can it filter solids or pump solids back to ponds 1, 2 and 3.
Therefore the disposal field started to fill up with very poor quality sewage and then overflow - in large and very toxic quantities.
Now QLDC and ORC have been telling the public, and local MP Joseph Mooney, that it is only “treated water” that is escaping from the disposal field.
This “treated water” we now know has been tested at up to 2,500,000 e coli units, it’s getting into our rivers all the time, and Auckland beaches get closed at 500 e coli units.
Who knew what - and when?
QLDC knew everything - since the very beginning. We know this via a network of engineers, consultants and experts who have worked on the disposal field project at different times.
The different contractors kept their QLDC bosses and managers fully informed, as we’d expect. After all - if they didn’t tell QLDC they could get blamed., and even held liable.
QLDC then blamed the contractors anyway, and kept changing contractors and key people in the hope that things would somehow get fixed.
It is also more than likely that QLDC senior managers knew, because they were told by the contractors, that the entire treatment plant design was poor. That the location was wrong. That the soil was wrong. That the plant capacity was insufficient for a booming population.
Everything was wrong.
But instead of telling the community this, QLDC decided to keep the entire story of the failed sewage plant under wraps. They couldn’t fix it so they just denied that the problem was real.
Once Crux started asking questions three weeks ago, and published our first story, this was the response from the QLDC comms team after we published our first story.
“Your story published today contains information that is inaccurate, misleading and unnecessarily inflammatory.”
The QLDC comms team are not saying that any more. In fact they are saying nothing to Crux. The mayor is saying nothing, the CEO is saying nothing - and other local media are saying nothing.
Our questions go unanswered.
And yet for three weeks we have published this and other videos showing large quantities of partially treated sewage being deliberately and illegally discharged in the Kawarau River through a permanent QLDC pipe up against the disposal field fence.
The Otago Regional Council.
The regulator in this situation is the Otago Regional Council.
They issue the resource consents for the Shotover plant and they issue the necessary licences to discharge adequately treated sewage into the ground that the plant is built on. Specifically the bed of the disposal field.
As a reminder, that waste has to be less than 260 e coli units and it can’t be discharged anywhere outside the disposal field fence.
The ORC issued its first abatement notice to the QLDC for breaching these conditions and licences on May 27, 2021. It’s a comprehensive document that details extensive evidence, from seven different disposal field locations, of the field overflowing and not working as per the resource consent requirements.
August 25, 2021 was the legal deadline to get everything fixed and stop the overflow.
To the best of our knowledge nothing happened. Nothing changed. Nobody was prosecuted. Nobody really knew this was happening apart from the engineers, the ORC and the QLDC.
At some stage six infringement notices were issued by the ORC to the QLDC, but nothing changed.
On the 18 March 2024 the ORC issued the QLDC with a second abatement notice. The first 2021 notice remained in force as nothing had been fixed.
Houses were still being built, offices, tourism facilities - you name it, it was being built. And all of those thousands of new buildings were producing more and more sewage.
A lot more.
The 2024 abatement notice makes astonishing reading. Crux took seven detailed reads, and hundreds of hours of research, to fully understand what the numbers meant.
Here’s both the 2021 and 2024 abatement notices, they’re written in plain english with heaps of photographs. It’s quite good investigative journalism in its own right. Keep in mind that 260 CFU’s per 100 millilitres is the QLDC’s resource consent safe number and the national standard for safe treated swimming water.
Crux believes this story will change soon. It will become a national disgrace for the Southern Lakes community.
And as is often the case, its not the initial failure or original incident that is the problem. Its the cover up - in this case by both the regulated body - the QLDC, and potentially even worse, the regulator, the Otago Regional Council.
Here’s the ORC’s full answers to the questions we posed this week, followed by the water test results they released today.
From ORC’s Chief Executive, Richard Saunders
Q - Why did ORC supply irrelevant data (MST) earlier this week to media and ORC elected members as “proof” that treated water from the Shotover plant was “highly treated” - the data shows nothing of the kind it is just the source of effluent (human, bird, dog) not quantity or quality.
A – ORC was requested to provide the data from recent water tests and this is what we did. We explained at the time that further information was coming including some context for those results. We had enough evidence at that stage to be confident that the discharge was highly treated and this position has not changed. A statement about these results along with a second set of water sample results in included below and attached (above)
ORC said: "Please find attached the data from the recent water samples taken on site. Staff are still assessing these but they show that any discharge at the site is highly treated.”
Q - This statement is both untrue and misleading - please explain and comment.
A – See above response.
We have already supplied you with comment from Auckland Council that confirms your data (as supplied) is not linked to water treatment quality - only the likely source of such (unknown) effluent. Also Auckland Council has confirmed that they close public beaches at 500 e coli CFU’s per 100 ml - QLDC Shotover ORC consents limits them to 260 CFU’s at the Shotover WWTP within the disposal field fence - outside the fence the allowance is zero. ORC abatement notices have recorded the following levels outside the Shotover disposal field fence - 380,000 and 2,500,000 million colony forming units (CFU’s) of e coli per 100 ml of Queenstown “treated” sample water.
Q - Why has ORC not already forced the closure of this facility and prosecuted QLDC as being the source of a clear and present danger to public health and safety - let alone damage to the environment?
A – We are working through our compliance and monitoring processes which includes consideration of appropriate enforcement action. We are not providing any further comment at this stage.
Statement
On November 20, 2024, Otago Regional Council staff conducted wastewater sampling around the Shotover Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) disposal field.
Ten samples were collected from different locations and tested for the routine set of tests. Additionally, seven of these locations were tested for Microbial Source Tracking (MST). MST is a scientific method that uses genetic markers in bacteria to identify the source of bacterial contamination. This analysis aimed to determine whether human effluent is present.
We released the MST results earlier this week. The MST results only detected human MST markers on one of the seven samples and that was just over the limit of detection. However, caution is advised as this result is based on a single sample and close to the detection limit. The other 6 samples were below detection limits, and this includes all samples taken from the disposal field itself.
The routine testing results were received by ORC on 3 December 2024 and these are attached. The laboratory analysed E.coli samples to a range of “less than 1000 CFU/100ml”. Whilst specific values would be more useful, they indicate that E.coli levels were not high at the discharge point and did not increase across the sampled area. We have since undertaken further sampling and hope to have these results by early next week and we expect these to contain specific E.coli values.
Other key water quality indicators, include.
- Total Suspended Solids (TSS)
- Total Nitrogen (TN)
- Total Ammoniacal Nitrogen (TAN)
- Total Kjeldahl Nitrogen (TKN)
- Total Phosphorus (TP)
- Total Biochemical Oxygen Demand (TBOD5/BOD5)
- Faecal Coliforms (FC)
- Potential of Hydrogen (pH)
These parameters provide valuable insights into water quality, helping ORC monitor pollution levels, ensure regulatory compliance, and protect environmental and public health. The resource consent for the Shotover WWTP specifies limits for BOD5, TSS, TN, and E. coli prior to discharge to the disposal field. When these limits are applied to the discharge sampled at the disposal field key findings include:
- TSS and TN were fully compliant with resource consent limits.
- BOD5 levels were slightly elevated but still within compliance with consent limits due to averaging.
- E. coli levels were unable to be assessed directly against consent limits because they were analysed to a range as discussed above. However, they were all under the threshold of 1000 CFU/100ml, which is relatively low.
Crux will continue our coverage next week. We have commissioned our own water tests and hope to publish details when the results come back next week.
Thank you Crux for keeping us informed. As our council certainly isn't.
Keep up the fantastic work Crux. This is incredibly important.