WATER NEW ZEALAND WASTEWATER
Making trouble is my business Wellington’s outspoken Owhiro Bay water activist, Eugene Doyle, outlines how his vexed relationship with Wellington Water transformed into collaboration to help clean up the capital’s south coast. By Eugene Doyle.
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trucks that, at a cost of $100,000 a day, chauffeured the city’s poo round our coastal road and up to the landfill for disposal. In the coming days all this argy-bargy would find its way into most mainstream national news outlets. The formidable councillor Fleur Fitzsimons hauled the executives over the coals for their behaviour towards me. My community, including our highly talented and pugnacious residents’ association, rallied around, as did a network of water activists like the Friends of the Owhiro Stream and the Owhiro Stream Team. The water company took a public beating and as a result, issued a public apology: “Wellington Water apologises for ‘inappropriate’ email rant”, ran the front page headline. I graciously accepted: “Doyle told Stuff he had accepted the apology and didn’t hold any grudges over the exchange. “It’s been a tough week for those guys. A lot of water has passed under the bridge, even if a fair bit of it is turd-infested. “We’re very focused on what really counts – which is cleaning up the bay and ensuring everyone has access to information.” The stoush and the media flurry it triggered did what I had been gunning for over weeks of campaigning. It forced the company to change tack and seriously engage. The hard fact is that without a media ‘share price’, it’s hard to get people to take you seriously. The trick is to make it a fruitful conflict. Within hours of Councillor Fitzsimons’ call to me, I received another, equally surprising one – from Colin Crampton, chief executive, Wellington Water. It would prove to be the first of many contacts and the start of a process which by the end of the year would see significant changes to the way Wellington Water engaged with community groups, the launch of a data sharing platform, the way the company itself was structured, and major new initiatives launched to address the infrastructure failures that led to the contamination of Tapu Teranga Marine Reserve and the Owhiro Stream. Colin’s involvement was transformational and he has remained
Eugene Doyle
PHOTO COURTESY OF: DEBBIE RAWSON
“I just thought I’d warn you: you’re about to be attacked in the media.” The phone call was from my local councillor and it was a Friday evening in February 2020. I had been battling Wellington Water for weeks over dangerous levels of faecal contamination that had closed our bay and polluted our stream, as well as their refusal to share data with us. The thought of being up against Wellington Water, one of the region’s biggest companies, with a PR budget running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, jangled my nerves. The trigger was an email I had sent them, cc’d to media: “As an organisation we are calling on you to stop trying to be Bond villains on trainer wheels and start engaging with us as, effectively, the public servants you are. “Given the crisis, given its ongoing nature, how on earth can you justify not testing the stream mouth and having a hopeless monitoring programme upstream? The pressure on you won’t stop until you do the right thing.” Bond villains on trainer wheels. They didn’t like that. Now they were biting back. Their reply, sent to the same media, publicly accused me of being sensationalist, inaccurate and a poor community leader. Tensions between the water company and our community had been running high since our bay was closed in January last year due to enterococci counts hitting hundreds of times the safe-toswim level through faecal contamination in the Owhiro Stream coming from failing pipes. Water asset failures had become an almost daily front page story and we were up to our eyeballs in what I described as a tsunami of faecal matter. Wellington Water hadn’t liked sharing data or were incredibly slow and poor at it. I had only succeeded in getting scraps from them. That day we were also told monitoring of the stream outlet would be stopping shortly. The frustrations built as a major pipe linking the city’s Moa Point sewage treatment facility and the Southern Landfill (also located in Owhiro Bay) broke in February, leading to hundreds of daily truck movements of the infamous turd taxis – a fleet of
“The thought of being up against Wellington Water, one of the region’s biggest companies... jangled my nerves.”
MARCH / APRIL 2021 WATER NEW ZEALAND
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