{"id":115342,"date":"2025-11-03T08:47:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T08:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/115342\/"},"modified":"2025-11-03T08:47:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T08:47:10","slug":"oyster-farmers-to-be-compensated-for-wastewater-overflow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/115342\/","title":{"rendered":"Oyster farmers to be compensated for wastewater overflow"},"content":{"rendered":"

Watercare confirmed on Monday in a statement that it was discussing the issue of financial support with Aquaculture New Zealand<\/a>, which was acting for the oyster farmers.<\/p>\n

Chief executive Jamie Sinclair said Watercare was deeply sorry.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe understand how serious this is – it\u2019s caused disruption and hardship for people whose livelihoods depend on a clean harbour. We are genuinely sorry and we\u2019re committed to making it right,\u201d said Sinclair.<\/p>\n

Watercare said the pump station was stabilised and normal operations were restored on Thursday, with the combined wastewater and stormwater pumped from the stormwater pond back into the pump station on Thursday and Friday.<\/p>\n

The agency said a thorough clean-up of the area was carried out over the weekend and the pond was refilled with clean, unchlorinated water in line with advice from Auckland Council\u2019s freshwater ecologist<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It said testing had since shown the pond water was now within safe levels.<\/p>\n

Watercare said the overflow was a unique incident caused by a technical failure after a power surge, which disrupted operations at the Warkworth site.<\/p>\n

It is understood the surge tripped the pumps, causing the pump station\u2019s storage tank to fill.<\/p>\n

Sinclair said the cause of this overflow was different to past issues caused by rainfall and growth putting pressure on existing infrastructure, and which was being addressed by infrastructure upgrades.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis overflow was caused by a power surge and compounded by our alert system not working as we would expect, which meant it was not identified as quickly as it should have been.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sinclair said two investigations were under way \u2013 one looking at the cause of the power surge that tripped the pumps and resulted in the overflow; while the second review would look at why alarms did not immediately alert Watercare to the problem.<\/p>\n

– RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Watercare confirmed on Monday in a statement that it was discussing the issue of financial support with Aquaculture…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115343,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5195,82167,12967,2082,111,43,139,69,82168,82166,61,78597],"class_list":["post-115342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-be","tag-compensated","tag-farmers","tag-for","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-overflow","tag-oyster","tag-to","tag-wastewater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}