Source: Radio New Zealand
Moa Point. RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Catastrophes like the recent sewage spill in Wellington will happen again due to a lack of skilled water operators, a water engineer says.
Millions of litres of untreated wastewater have been discharged daily into the south coast of Wellington since the Moa Point plant failed this month.
Ownership of the plant is set to change hands from the Wellington City Council to the new water entity, Tiaki Wai.
But water engineer, Iain Rabbits, who has been working in the industry for 35 years, told Nine to Noon wastewater failures, including the 2016 spill in Havelock North, come down to a lack of experienced workers and inadequate support for staff on the ground.
He said the industry’s capability issues have been known about for years.
Rabbits said he did not know the specifics about what went wrong at Moa Point but he had done many investigations into issues at water plants in the past and they usually all had the same issues.
“It usually comes down to lack of staff, knowledge, experience, no support for guys on the ground,” Rabbits said.
“Lack of investment and lack of transparency through to the governance level.”
Millions of litres of untreated wastewater have been discharged daily into the south coast of Wellington. RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
The issues would continue until the issues of culpability and capacity was addressed, he said.
“I did a survey at the Water Industry Operations Group last year and about 20 percent of our operators are on call continuously, or every other week, which is just not sustainable. We just don’t have enough people.”
“That’s because we haven’t been training them, and when we do train them, we don’t train the sufficiently.”
Rabbits said the water industry differed greatly from the electrical industry in that an electrical apprentice goes through years of training with a supervisor, whereas in water, “we tend to give people a manual – if they’re lucky – and say ‘don’t kill anybody’ and off you go”.
“It’s like getting a plane full of passengers, sitting them in the pilot’s seat, saying ‘here’s the manual, you fly the plane’. It’s crazy.”
These days, treatment plants had much tighter standards and were highly technical, requiring careful monitoring, and have instrumentation and automation that need maintaining.
“But the operators need to understand what the automation is doing, otherwise when something goes wrong, they’ve got no idea how to fix it.”
Rabbits told Nine to Noon he was “absolutely surprised” by the Moa Point failure.
“To flood a whole plant with anything takes a really good effort to do that, I think.
This map shows the Moa Point sewage spill along Wellington’s south coast. Supplied, CC BY-NC-ND
“Whether that’s a failure of maintenance, a failure of operation or a failure of experience or no support for the operators, whatever it is, to get to that point is quite serious.”
Training operators was going to be a major way of solving issues found at treatment plants, he said.
As far as he was aware, there was no legal requirement for anyone operating a plant to have a qualification of any kind.
A water operator assessment was available, he said, but staff needed to learn from working alongside senior operators and those with a lot of experience.
Wellington Water chief executive Pat Dougherty earlier told RNZ there had been under-investment over a long period at the Moa Point plant.
“I worry that there may have been some early warning signs that there were troubles with the discharge and we missed those. But everything needs to be on the table,” he said.
He said there have been a couple of incidents over the last few months that he suspects may have been early indicators.
Wellington Water chairman Nick Leggett has since resigned from his position.
Leggett said leadership carried responsibility, and stepping aside would allow Wellington Water to focus on fixing the problems and restoring public trust.
An independent government review has also been announced and would examine the causes of the failure. Leggett said he would fully cooperate with that process.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
