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Watercare’s new wastewater treatment plant at Snells Beach was officially opened on Monday morning, September 15, by Building and Construction Minister and local MP Chris Penk and Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown.
More than 100 guests heard that the plant was already taking half of Warkworth’s sewage and would begin processing all of it next month.
The new plant has taken more than three years to build and is a huge step up in treatment technology, according to project manager Casper Kruger.
“It’s a complete change in approach, it creates a far better quality of wastewater and on a much larger scale,” he said.
The plant has also been designed with extra capacity that can come on stream when needed, as the local population increases.
Mayor Wayne Brown said it was state of the art and a key part of Watercare’s $450 million, multi-pronged programme to upgrade and improve local wastewater treatment and allow for growth. As well as the new plant, the other major components are the six-kilometre pipeline from Warkworth to Snells Beach, the new pumping station at Lucy Moore Park, an 800-metre pipe to take the treated wastewater out to sea off Martins Bay, and the still-to-be-built pipeline from Warkworth Showgrounds to Lucy Moore.
“In some ways, this is servicing an area where greenfield growth’s got ahead of infrastructure,” Brown said.
“Watercare is constantly under pressure from various people who want to buy land and subdivide in the green areas. And when that gets ahead of infrastructure, you get environmental damage, and that is what happened here, but we’re fixing that and we’re now ahead of the infrastructure.”
Brown said the new plant would reduce wet weather flows, increase the reliability of the water system, protect waterways and significantly improve the health of the Mahurangi River and surrounding marine systems.
“I’m sure the oyster farmers will be happy about that,” he said.
Watercare Board chief executive Geoff Hunt agreed, saying such huge, complex projects involving many stakeholders took a long time to come to fruition, but would result in vast improvements at every level when completed.
“When that final bit of infrastructure is in place – and we’ve brought that forward from completion in 2028 to completion late next year – we expect very, very, very few overflows into the Mahurangi River,” he said. “This is the complete diversion of treated wastewater from the Mahurangi River, from the Mahurangi Harbour, out offshore through Martins Bay.”
Hunt added that the programme’s safety record had been exemplary, with more than 800,000 hours worked and just one injury involving time off work, and he thanked everyone involved in the construction.
The old Warkworth and Snells Beach treatment plants are being decommissioned.
A video on construction of the new plant shown at the opening can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/1116636901
