Wellington sludge break found 200m inside Mt Albert tunnel, but could still take a month to fix

Sunday, 26 January 2020

Wellington Water is still working around the clock to stop Wellington's sludge entering Cook Strait, as it continues to try and determine the level of damage to the pipe.

Trucks are working 24 hours to collect sludge from the Moa Point Treatment Plant and take it to the landfill, and Wellington Water say they will soon start talking to Owhiro Bay residents about the smelly transportation of the sludge.

Since the trucking began, the operation has been refined by reducing the number of trucks on the road and splitting them in to two shifts of six to seven trucks each.

A contractor at the Moa Point treatment plant in Wellington connects a waste pipe to a sewage truck for transport to landfill.

'The trucking operations are going really well and it's keeping the slurry out of Cook Strait,' Wellington Water spokesman Alex van Paassen said.

The break of the sludge pipe has been located by Wellington Water.

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Contractors are making about 300 trips a day to truck millions of litres of sludge to a landfill after the pipe failed.

'They've got a good rhythm now of operating that trucking, and they'll just keep doing that while we look at some other options to manage the situation.'

Van Paassen said now they had a better understanding of what it was dealing with, it would begin engaging with the community of Owhiro Bay through which the trucks were moving to deposit the sludge at the landfill.

The Wellington City Council's roading team had been contacted to examine the truck movements.

Since the pipe failed, contractors have been making about 150 trips a day to shift millions of litres of sludge.

The fault in the pipeline is about 200 metres inside the tunnel under Mt Albert.

But investigators had not yet pinpointed the exact origins of the leak or the extent of the damage, and it was still unclear when the pipe would be fixed and operational again.

The truck transportation of the sludge was expected to continue for at least the next month.

Unlike the pipe failures in the Wellington CBD last month, which resulted in millions of litres of wastewater being pumped into the harbour, the pipes that have now failed are relatively new. They were built in the mid-1990s to stop the outflow of sludge into the Cook Strait.