Queenstown council failed to install protozoa barrier that would have averted crypto outbreak because of 'tens of millions' cost
Analysis: Queenstown Lakes council has less than 24 hours to issue a plan to deal with its cryptosporidiosis outbreak – New Zealand’s worst waterborne illness crisis since the fatal Havelock North contamination.
At 5.30pm last night, new Three Waters regulator Taumata Arowai slapped the council with the agency’s first compliance order. The stinging indictment was made public soon after 8pm.
The council is already directing Queenstown and Frankton residents to boil water for at least a minute. It must move quickly with a plan to engage the public, and to deal with the lack of a protozoa barrier at the Two Mile water treatment plant.
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According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, cryptosporidiosis is not normally a serious disease in healthy people. But it can lead to a life-threatening illness for people with a weak immune system.
The lack of a protozoa barrier creates “a serious risk to public health”, says Taumata Arowai regulatory head Steve Taylor.
Residents such as small business operator Mallory Perigo are already taking their own steps by buying bottled water.
I was in Queenstown last week, for the finance leaders' debate. Post-Covid, it’s full of tourists and humming. The cryptosporidiosis outbreak has put a dampener on that. This week, the council’s environmental health team has contacted about 170 food operators, mostly in person.
Mayor Glyn Lewers is to front a press conference later today, but he spoke with me this morning. He acknowledges the contamination probably began early this month, and the 17 cases confirmed thus far will be just the tip of the iceberg.
A compliance order is one of the strongest ‘remedial’ tools under the Water Services Act. Taumata Arowai can use them to address serious risks to public health, or contraventions of legislative requirements or drinking water safety plans.
The person who receives a compliance order must comply with it and meet the costs of doing so. Failure to comply with the order is an offence, with a maximum fine of $300,000 for a corporate body.
"This does highlight the challenges. It also, I think, reinforces the need for water reform." – Glyn Lewers, Queenstown mayor
Queenstown's compliance order will give council engineers legal reinforcement to act quickly and decisively. But this goes to the guts of why the Three Waters reforms are important, Lewers admits.
The council should have had a protozoa barrier in place at its Two Mile plant, one of the biggest in the district. Three years ago, it advertised a tender for a design and build project to upgrade Two Miles – but then cancelled the tender, saying it was considering its next steps for the project.
A copy of the compliance order, supplied by Taumata Arowai at Newsroom's request, says taking drinking water from Lake Wakatipu can reasonably be expected to result in the presence of pathogenic protozoa – for instance, from effluent overflows from Queenstown’s urban wastewater network.
The order is issued on behalf of Taumata Arowai chief executive Allan Prangnell.
"The lack of a protozoa barrier at the Two Mile water treatment plant creates a serious risk to public health, demonstrated by confirmed cases of cryptosporidiosis affecting consumers in the Queenstown drinking water supply distribution zone served by the Two Mile water treatment plant," he warns.
"The Queenstown distribution zone and the Kelvin Heights distribution zone (incorporating parts of Frankton) are hydraulically linked and can share treated drinking water.
"I believe, on reasonable grounds, that the requirements and directions of this order will prevent, reduce, or eliminate the serious risk to public health relating to the Queenstown drinking water supply."
The council work plan still lists a protozoa barrier at Two Mile as a necessary upgrade to reach full Drinking Water Quality Assurance Rules compliance – but the mayor says it hasn’t found the funding.
"We've got other intakes in a similar situation, and we're progressively upgrading them as we go," Lewers says.
Recently they've done Arrowtown, they're commissioning the Shotover bores now, they've reached an agreement with Cardrona, and there are still more to do. "I think Two Mile is probably the most difficult and the most expensive," he says. "So we were still working through the options of what to do."
There are two types of barrier. There’s UV treatment, which is cheap and easy and the council will probably set in place now – but it’s not very effective.
Far better is membrane filtration, which has a pore size of 0.1–0.5µm and removes particles, bacteria and protozoa from water. (It’s less effective for viruses – that’s why every water plant needs an array of three or four treatments.)
But membrane filtration is expensive. Lewers says the council had estimates running into the tens of millions of dollars.
Queenstown has "heightened cost pressures" because of the combination of high residential growth and an extremely high visitor load, he says.
But there are many other councils around the country with drinking water and wastewater plants that aren't up to consentable standards, nor up to the new water-quality bar. "This does highlight the challenges," Lewers says. "It also, I think, reinforces the need for water reform."
