Hobson Bay in central Auckland. Photo: Supplied / Shaun Lee
Residents of a central Auckland suburb are fed up with frequent sewage overflows ruining what should be a picturesque coastal view.
A community group in Hobson Bay, just east of the city centre, says the council is responding too slowly to the flood of faeces.
Rain or shine, local woman Margot Nicholson said sewage was a regular sight.
"We have dry weather spills, which are from broken pipes and blockages and things. Those are happening almost all the time," she said.
"In wet weather, the phrase we use is: if it's wet enough for your hair to get wet ... there will be spills."
Margot Nicholson, right, says sewage is a regular sight in Hobson Bay. Photo: Supplied
Hobson Bay and the neighbouring Judges Bay had been haunted by frequent wastewater spills for several years.
Much of the surrounding residential area still used combined waste and stormwater pipes that were over 100 years old and prone to leaks.
Most recently, the 2023 storms broke the wastewater pipeline in Judges Bay necessitating a $13 million repair that is still ongoing.
Nicholson, who serves as a spokesperson for community group Hapua Thrive, had to warn people not to swim in faeces.
"I was going for a walk and there was a woman there with her little boy racing across the mud flats, very excited to get into the water, and I had to say to her: 'look, do you know what the situation is?'"
Wastewater biologist Gemma Tolich Allen said the amount of sewage flowing into the bays was extreme.
"When there are high flows into the harbour, the bacterial levels are extremely high and they're the sort of levels that I would see entering a wastewater treatment plant," she said.
"We're actually seeing the harbour doing the treatment of the sewage waste that should actually be going to a wastewater treatment plant."
Allen said Hobson and Judges Bay were effectively acting as an open-air treatment plant, which wasn't fair to ratepayers.
"When we're charged on our wastewater bill ... when you have large volumes of water not being treated, expecting the local environment to treat it, then you're actually short changing the community."
Nicholson said enough was enough and it was time for council to do something about it.
"I don't believe they are doing enough. They've known about this forever, they've got the projects there, and there are fixes available. There's been a lot of work in monitoring, which is great, but they know the problem, they know what they need to do, and they need to get on and do it," she said.
"I don't think our clean, green reputation is deserved ... it's not okay for Hobson Bay to be effectively a wastewater treatment plant."
Auckland Council's Watercare had invested $8 billion into upgrading and repairing Auckland's wastewater system over the next decade.
The centrepiece of that work was the Central Interceptor, which head of wastewater planning Andrew Deutschle claimed would reduce overflows in the western isthmus by 80 percent.
Hobson Bay is in the east and wouldn't benefit directly, but Deutschle said the $1.6b project would help ease the load.
The benefit it provides for Hobson Bay, for Judges Bay, and for other parts of the eastern isthmus is it takes some of the load off our Orakei Main Sewer," he said.
"By taking a load off that, that allows other sources in the eastern isthmus to better utilise that asset."
The Central Interceptor was due in late 2026, but Nicholson had her sights set on a different project.
The Newmarket Gully was originally promised for 2016, but still hadn't left the feasibility stage almost ten years later.
"There was a plan that there would be a tunnel, or a storage tank, that would reduce the overflows in this area by 50 percent. That still hasn't been done, that's still in the planning process," she said.
That project would redirect overflows to a storage tunnel to reduce leakage into Hobson Bay.
But Deutschle said it wouldn't be completed until 2033.
"The current timing for the Newmarket Gully project is working towards completion by 2033, with our large-scale complex projects we find that they often take some time and we need to really carefully consider or sometimes reassess options."
Gemma Tolich Allen had witnessed frequent spills into Judges Bay over multiple decades and said work on the Newmarket Gully had been too slow.
"I believe, as a wastewater biologist, that the environmental cost can be reversed.... but when you're looking at 40 years of Judges Bay still being contaminated, that's a whole generation of people who have been unable to use it," she said.
Watercare said it planned to eventually replace all of the old combined waste and stormwater pipes with separate lines, but the process would take decades.
Until then, projects like the Central Interceptor and Newmarket Gully would reduce the frequency of spills, and Watercare would prioritise areas that were at a higher risk of overflows.
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