The Germans are here: Wellington pipe repairs underway

Thursday, 7 May 2020

Additional funding to fix Wellington's underground pipe network looks set to bump up Wellington rates.

A German team of experts has passed through quarantine and are now fixing a pipe failure deep beneath the hills of Wellington.

A pipe, carrying sewage treatment by-product between Moa Point and a plant near the Wellington landfill, failed in January. Since then, a parade of trucks has been ferrying that same 'sludge' by road along Wellington's south coast.

The fix required a team of five German specialists being flown out on a charter plane, spending a quarantine period in Auckland, before arriving in Wellington to get to work.

Wellington Water confirmed the team was now in Wellington after completing quarantine and were preparing to insert a liner through the failed pipe.

Wellington Water contractors take sludge from the Moa Point Treatment Plant to the Southern Landfill after a wastewater pipe broke under Mt Albert.

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A Wellington Water graph from 2018 showing the age of the city's pipes.

Wellington Water hoped to know when the job would be completed in the coming days.

Wellington ratepayers have been paying nearly $100,000 a day to ferry wastewater from Moa Point treatment plant to the landfill.

It was recently revealed the cost of the fix and transportation of the sludge was expected to reach as high as $16m.

The initial cost of transporting the waste was estimated to be $1m, before rising to $3m. But Wellington City Council papers recently showed trucking costs had soared to between $8.7m and $11.1m. Those figures assumed the problem can be fixed by late May.

The cost to fix the pipe - involving flying the German experts to New Zealand - added another $4m to $5m to the bill.

Most of the money would have to come from Wellington City Council borrowing.

The plan is for the German experts to initially patch the leak then insert a polyester liner through the pipe.

There was also a temporary backup plan if the liner bid failed. This would involve putting a pump station on Town Belt land at the Berhampore Golf Course, meaning the sludge trucks would not be needed.

A third option, if the first and second options failed, involved fastening a temporary pipeline to the roof of the sewerage tunnel.

The fourth and final option was to continue trucking.