Last Saturday I went to pay my respects to one of the grand old men who built the Canterbury Plains, the Rakaia River.

The Rakaia River is the greatest of the remaining untamed braided rivers. Starting in the Southern Alps it reaches the ocean south of Lake Ellesmere/Te Waihora. It is one of the rivers that literally formed the Canterbury plains by moving rocks and stones down from the Southern Alps over millions of years.

The Rakaia was the first river in New Zealand to be protected by a Water Conservation Order (WCO) in 1988 – Water Conservation Orders are the equivalent of national parks for rivers.

Russel and Eugenie Sage next to Rakaia River

The WCO protects minimum flows in the river and draws a line in the sand against irrigators and hydro companies. In a world where greed never sleeps, and freshwater is everyday more valuable, WCOs are essential to stop the relentless pressure to take a little bit more every year until there is nothing left.

And that’s why Trustpower (owned by Infratil) and the National Party Government are determined to break the WCO protecting the Rakaia River to extract water to irrigate up to 140,000 hectares of south Canterbury. There’s money in that river and they want it.

They plan to mine this national park.

Rakaia River with Mount Hutt in the background

I started the day at the bottom of the Rakaia, at the Rakaia Huts settlement at the mouth of the river. I travelled with Eugenie Sage, one of the elected ECAN councillors that Nick Smith sacked because she stood up for water, and Scott Walters from the local Greens. We met with Bill Southward, chair of the hutholders association, and went out on his jet boat to see what’s happening. First time I’d been in a jet boat, quite good fun.

Bill and jet boat

One of the paradoxes is that low flows in the Rakaia causes flooding at Rakaia Huts settlement. A bit counterintuitive, but at the mouth of the river it is, as Bill puts it, The River versus the Sea. The ocean current carries shingle north up the coast, and, if the river flow is weak, the sea will close the entrance to the Rakaia river with shingle. And if the entrance is closed the river will bank up and the lagoon will rise up until it floods parts of the settlement.

Mouth of the Rakaia with shingle being pushed from right to left by the coastal currents

Bill’s lived down there for donkey’s years and has seen more and more flooding as the river has got weaker as more and more of its water has been abstracted by dairy corporations, either directly from the river or from the many bores drilled down near to the river.

He showed us how the spring fed rivers running into the lagoon had reduced in flow, as a result of the groundwater dropping under the impact of extraction for dairying.

On the bank of the lagoon

Then we had a meeting with the locals at the community hall. A few people came over from the huts on the south side of the river but most of them from the north bank settlement. It would be fair to say that there was a fair representation of four wheel drives and the hunting fishing shooting fraternity amongst the attendees.

Meeting at Rakaia Huts Community Hall

People at the meeting had a lot of memories and stories to share. Memories of when there used to be trout in the Selwyn river, before it was drained for, and polluted by, irrigation. Stories about how they used to swim in the rivers as kids but how they wouldn’t let their kids in them now. Stories about what a great wonderful river the Rakaia was but they feared they were witnessing its slow death just as they had witnessed the slow death of other nearby rivers.

And they had a great anger at their loss, an anger that all New Zealanders should share. They saw the arrival of the great dairy herds – 5000 cows on Rakaia island between the north and south branches of the Rakaia river with ready access to irrigation water and effluent disposal.

As ordinary New Zealanders who liked to hunt and fish and enjoy the outdoors they felt helpless when faced with the giant dairy corporations with all their money, and with the Selwyn District Council and the government in their pocket. Conspiracy theories abounded.

Pivot irrigator on banks of Waimakariri River.

And rightly so, there is a conspiracy. There is a conspiracy to drain the Rakaia for more dairying. Forest and Bird’s Official Information Act requests revealed that as far back as September 2009 central government was meeting with Trustpower and had decided that they needed to change the WCO on the Rakaia if Trustpower’s irrigation scheme using Lake Coleridge for storage was to proceed. Here’s one abstract

Aide Memoire from Gerry Brownlee and David Carter to John Key, 4/9/09:

To accelerate the TrustPower Lake Coleridge proposal, application could be made to MfE to amend or revoke the existing Rakaia WCO.

Officials and Ministers were looking at how to change the WCO so they could get access to the water and lower the minimum flow. The following graphic shows probably the best case scenario for the impact of the scheme:

The Government was looking for a way forward when an opportunity presented itself in the form of the Canterbury mayors attacking ECAN. When the Government removed the elected councillors at ECAN, they simultaneously undermined WCOs in Canterbury with the same legislation. The earthquake has now provided perfect cover to steal the water from the river.

Only a people’s revolt will stop the river-eating dairy corporations and their agents in central and local government.

Pivot irrigator, Canterbury Plains

Then we headed upland through miles and miles of industrial dairying. Bill remembered when all this land was drystock farming and now it’s all irrigated with the Rakaia’s water.

We stopped to look at a fish trap – masses of water is taken from the north bank of the river next to the SH1 bridge and enters irrigation channels and passes through this dinky machine supposedly to remove fish.

According to those who have seen it in operation it kills more than it saves.

Here is one where water is taken from the south bank. This is the amount of water taken when irrigation is not occurring.

Then we went up to the Rakaia Gorge. Most of its length the Rakaia is a braided river spreading widely across its shingle covered river bed, but here in the gorge it is penned in for a while and it thrashes from side to side as it passes through.

We stopped for lunch above the gorge to be briefed by Dr Tim Davie from the regional council about studies underway to understand how much river water is lost to groundwater.

It seems that both flow minimums and flow variability are essential to the health of the river. Minimum flows mean that there is enough habitat for freshwater fish; medium flow events clean out the periphyton that grows on the shingle underwater; and big flows are essential for cleaning out the vegetation that grows on the islands between the braids. This vegetation can act as habitat for stoats and other predators of the birds on the river. If you eliminate the variability by controlling the flow, you eliminate the flora and fauna adapted to that variability.

Edith Smith from Ashburton Forest and Bird talked about the flora and fauna of the river. Nearly three quarters of all the wrybills in the world live on the Rakaia – wrybills are the only bird to have a a right bending beak – to poke under the shingle for food. Black fronted terns are endangered but common on the river – absolutely beautiful.

Time for my second ever jet boat trip, this time in Phil Deans’ jetboat.

Phil’s family are old time Canterbury, their family donated the park in town and the family homestead was famously destroyed in the quake. Phil is a farmer in the foothills who thinks we are doing too much too fast and threatening what makes NZ special, like the Rakaia River where he fishes and jetboats.

We went down to the Highbank intake, where Trustpower are already pumping up water using some of the existing infrastructure of the Rangitata Diversion race.

Then we headed upstream through the gorge. Stunning place. These are the places that make New Zealand special.

The Rakaia River Gorge – NZ how it’s supposed to be

Those who came before us wisely protected this magnificent river. They made this river into a national park for all of us. Now a new generation wants to mine this national park. We mustn’t let them drain the light from this beautiful river.

I’m standing next to Shayne Cunis, Watercare’s Water Treatment Manager. Shayne has been involved in various battles that Watercare has conducted to try to stop the Waikato River getting even more polluted, and, much to his chagrin, I mentioned him and Watercare’s battles in Parliament a few years back.

This is me drinking the water.

Tastes pretty damn good actually, but by crikey it takes a lot of effort to make it this good.

This is what the river water looks like after it is drawn from the river, screened for big objects and has coagulants added.

Pretty ugly. You may be able to see large globs of muck coagulating on the aluminium sulphate coagulant.

Then this is what it looks like after the coagulated gunk is removed.

Much cleaner but still with a lot of nutrients. There is algae visibly growing on the surface and on the pipes.

Then the river water goes into the really fancy part of the treatment plant which is the membrane filtration – lots of long straws with tiny little holes in them – the holes are 0.035 microns across (micron is one thousandth of the milimetre). So only things that are smaller than 0.035 microns can get through into the straw and to your tap – which stops the protozoa such as giardia and cryptosporidium (from all the animal faeces in the river).

This is what the straws look like when they are out of the water.

After getting through the straws then they go through carbon filters, which apparently have nematodes and other things growing on them which filter the water even further. You can see through the clean water down to the carbon filters in this picture.

Then it gets a bit of chlorine added to kill the viruses and anything else. A bit of fluoride is added, as well as some lime to get the pH right.

And then out comes clean water that is sent in a pipe over the Bombay Hills to contribute about 10% of Auckland’s water – a number that is likely to increase over time as Auckland grows.

This very sophisticated treatment plant cost around $155m. It delivers water at around 19c per cubic metre (1000 litres), which is considerably higher than the cost of the water coming out of the dams in the Hunua Ranges.

The Waikato river treatment plant and pipeline were built after the 1994 drought and were pretty controversial at the time. But it’s here to stay.

What I like about it is that it means that about one in three New Zealanders (Auckland, Hamilton et al) have a very direct interest in the quality of the water coming down the Waikato River because their drinking water is extracted from that catchment. The more polluted that water is, the more expensive and difficult it is to treat it. And if the water gets more polluted, then Watercare will have to invest in even more sophisticated treatment equipment than they have now.

So how bad is the water at the end of the Waikato river?

This is a photo of the mouth of the Waikato taken from the plane yesterday.

Really bad is the answer. It has masses of sediment, lots of nitrogen and phosphorous that feeds algal blooms and heaps of faeces and everything associated with faeces such as bacteria and viruses. There is also a fair bit of heavy metals, some of it natural and some added by Contact’s geothermal plant (they are one of the few geothermal plants that doesn’t re-inject).

A short way upstream of the mouth, the level of faeces near Auckland’s water intake regularly breaches swimming standards. The faeces is largely animal in origin.

In Hamilton they say “Flush twice, Auckland needs the water”. And it’s true that Hamilton’s treated sewerage goes into the Waikato, but only a small fraction of the pollution in the river is due to Hamilton’s sewerage or other point source discharges. Around 70% of all the nitrogen in the river, for example, comes from non-point sources, largely intensive agriculture.

Source: Waikato Regional Council

At the top of the river, as the water leaves Lake Taupō, it is so clean that you can see 12m or more through it. By the time Aucklanders extract it at Tuakau, you can’t see your feet if the water is half way up your ankles.

Median water clarity in Waikato River (Waikato Regional Council)

To get a first-hand view of the river I went for a paddle yesterday, starting at Mercer, past Auckland’s water intake, and pulling out at the Tuakau bridge.

At Mercer I met with Rangi Mahuta and Sally Koia from Waikato Tanui. They are pretty distressed about the state of the river. Tainui are now part of the joint management River Authority which was a Treaty settlement deal. It has some funding to clean up the river and some regulatory tools. The Government has appointed John Luxton to co-chair the Authority with Tuku Morgan, which, given Luxton’s background with Open Country Cheese with its record of pollution, doesn’t fill me with hope. But we shall see.

Joining me on the paddle were Al Fleming and Jon Wenham from Forest and Bird. Al has blogged on the trip too, reflecting

“I can remember swimming in the Waikato River at Cambridge on a daily basis during my summer youth, but one look at the Waikato River at Mercer reminded me why that was no longer possible.”

Jon on the river:

All the rain meant the river was probably even browner than usual – you can see the paddle disappearing into the water.

There were some nice bits of regenerating kahikatea forest, here’s Al in front of some.

We paddled down past the intake for Auckland’s water at this buoy.

And then we came across some pretty average farming practice in these parts.

These animals are unfenced right on the Waikato River. I went over to have a look and they decided I was interesting too, and a big bunch of them came over to have a look at the kayak.

The faeces and urine go straight into the river and the trampling on the edge adds to erosion and sediment. This is what Fed Farmers are defending against regulation.

It is very basic to fence animals out of large rivers, but even this very basic level of good farming practice isn’t in place on the river. We need rules in place to regulate intensive agriculture like this so that we can clean up our rivers.

The real challenge is that getting basic good farming practice in place is only the beginning. Even with good practice there is still a huge run-off of nitrogen from intensive agriculture. As I said in the House back in 2008

Watercare … stated in a submission that discharges from just one industrial dairy development in the Waikato catchment involving Landcorp could mean “the nitrate increase and increased risk of protozoa would cause a decline in water quality”, and “If irrigation was allowed for this one project, summer low flows in the Waikato would reduce by a further 13 percent and river nutrient concentrations could go up by 120 percent.”

Thankfully that particular project didn’t go ahead after the financial crisis but there are plenty more that will take off with dairy prices at high levels. We need clean water rules.

Thanks to everyone involved including Colin for the kayaks.

You can find it here: www.goodfarmstories.org.nz

There’s a wealth of material, so grab a cup of tea and enjoy!

It’s very timely, given the headline of the DomPost today: “Manawatu River ‘among worst in the West’”. As Russel’s response notes, much of the pollution of the Manawatu comes from farming effluent, nutrient run-off, erosion and damage to tributaries that do not have fences and riparian strips. This photo was taken last year and shows an example of the problems.

Russel quite rightly says: “Many farmers are taking it upon themselves to improve the situation, but the large-scale changes we need to return the Manawatu to an acceptable level will require Government leadership.”

So the Greens are keen to highlight Good Farm Stories, shine a spotlight on pollution from all sources – Russel notes the contibution of industrial factories like Fonterra and Tui, and town sewage – and push the Government into action.

Because if we don’t, we’ll lose the ecology of our great rivers, the right of the public to enjoy them, our clean and green image and with it our export markets. So what are we waiting for?

The NZ Recreational Canoeing Association and Fish and Game have jointly applied to the Ministry for the Environment for a Water Conservation Order on the Upper Hurunui River to protect the river and keep it in its natural state. A water conservation order would prevent dams and maintain healthy flows on the parts of the river which are covered by the order.

Forest and Bird are also seeking that the Mandamus tributary and the lower Hurunui River be added to the Water Conservation Order to protect native fish and birdlife, especially black-fronted tern and black-billed gull. Developers have already stated their intention to dam Lake Sumner and the South Branch of the Hurunui. A successful conservation order would pre-empt these proposals and save the river.

If you love the Hurunui we urge you to make a submission in support. A form which can be used is attached. Submissions must be lodged on or before 15 December 2008.

A copy of the application is on the Ministry for the Environment website.

Follow the link here for a full description of the process, hyperlinks, suggested topics and addresses. It is important that all voices are heard in any RMA process. Besides, by this time next year the public may not have a voice in the RMA process, so exercise your rights now!

One group of Kiwis, WRAP, are doing more than just thinking wider: they have a web petition and lots of info. Frog has enjoyed sploshing around their site and highly recommend you also leap in and sign their petition. They point out that while water is renewable, rivers are not. Every one you dam is one fewer left running free.

A sign that the Government and others are waking up to the increasing pressure on our environment by demand for new generation is the inclusion of this statement in Policy 3 of the proposed NPS on Renewable Energy:

When considering proposals to develop new renewable electricity generation activities, decision-makers must have particular regard to the relative degree of reversibility of the adverse environmental effects associated with proposed generation technologies.

It’s good to know that the Green Party has a strong policy of doing energy efficiency and conservation FIRST. Following the ETS negotiations NZ will now invest $1 billion  of work on making our homes more efficient, warm and dry. Not ideal conditions for a frog, but the humans will be happy. I’ll WRAP this post up there.

Should we damn the river and its environs by building a dam? Is building hydro power a reversible decision? I think everyone knows my answer to these important questions.

Meridian’s own secret impact report, which damns the project as destructive of irreplaceable biodiversity, was tabled by Meyt yesterday in Parliament. Should we be trashing some pristine wilderness for a mere 65MW hydro scheme?

Mallard’s press release yesterday calling for more measurement of water takes is laudable, but hardly a bold step in sorting out the appalling state of water in this country. In this morning’s interview, Russel slammed Labour’s glacial progress on water policy, saying that “after eight and a half years in government, it’s not good enough.”

Russel asked why Mallard is unwilling to review Benson-Pope’s decision to give ‘requiring authority’ to a private company in Canterbury that allows them to take land in order to build a massive irrigation scheme. All this at a time when water issues have local blood pressure running high. No real answer was given.

Russel asked why the MfE doesn’t make converting to dairy notifiable under the RMA, given that the MfE (and Mallard) acknowledge that such land use intensifications are the biggest source of the problem. Mallard hinted that this might happen, but hedged on timing or mechanism. Cowardice, I say!

Mallard said it would take at least a generation or two to clean up NZ’s disgustingly filthy waterways. No, really? Then why 8 years of delay and the promise of more delays? That’s half a generation gone already. Personally, I’d like to live to see the day we can once again swim safely in our rivers and lakes. Wouldn’t you?