expressed their frustration<\/a>, desperation and said they were losing faith.<\/p>\nLynette Dunn from the Mahurangi Oyster Farmers Association told RNZ the second million-dollar payment came after a battle.<\/p>\n
“We’ve been putting pressure on Watercare, they were supposed to have the final assessment all sorted out by the end of the year,” she said.<\/p>\n
“And they emailed us to say basically that they won’t be doing anything until the new year until the final assessments come through.”<\/p>\n
Dunn believed there might not have been a second payment without efforts from Aquaculture New Zealand.<\/p>\n
“We’re still paying off debts and it’s coming into our quiet season as well, so we’ve missed the bull mark with the peak of our season,” she said.<\/p>\n
“So hopefully this will help us just get through our quiet period when all the oysters are spawning out and they’re not sellable.”<\/p>\n
Dunn said many farmers were wondering how they would fare in the coming years.<\/p>\n
“The last spill they decided to get some sucker trucks so it didn’t overflow into the harbour, so why haven’t they been able to do that all along?” she asked.<\/p>\n
Farmer Tom Walters said he had only been able to farm for about six weeks of this year and bills and debts had mounted with little time to harvest.<\/p>\n
He had already twice considered closing the doors of his business.<\/p>\n
“This year’s been diabolical, I wouldn’t even be in business if it hadn’t been for lovely people who had donated and kept me going,” he told Checkpoint on 18 December.<\/p>\n
The overflow was a power surge combined with monitoring and alert systems failing.<\/p>\n
More than 1000 cubic metres of sewage overflowed, contaminating thousands of oysters in the Mahurangi River and stopping harvesting for nearly a month.<\/p>\n
It came at the peak of the season.<\/p>\n
“This incident should not have happened,” Watercare chief operations officer Mark Bourne said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Oyster farmers have faced ongoing contamination problems for several years, but Watercare said the October spill was unique.<\/p>\n
The payments go toward losses directly caused by that overflow and not other historical losses caused by the likes of weather or consented overflows<\/p>\n
“These matters are governed separately under environmental consents and regulatory frameworks,” it said.<\/p>\n
Watercare said it will be contacting farmers individually and confidentially to discuss the outcomes of the loss assessment once it is finished.<\/p>\n
Sign up for Ng\u0101 Pitopito K\u014drero<\/a>, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The sewage spill came at the peak of the oyster season. Photo: Nick Monro Watercare has fulfilled a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":110550,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[48,47,111,43,139,69,49,46,44,45],"class_list":{"0":"post-199820","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-zealand","8":"tag-audio","9":"tag-current-affairs","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-podcasts","15":"tag-public-radio","16":"tag-radio-new-zealand","17":"tag-rnz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199820","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=199820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199820\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}