Watery tale of sewage spills, leaks and an entity apparently flush with money
Saturday, 21 February 2026
The catastrophic failure at the Moa Point treatment plant on Wellington's south coast, which has seen hundreds of millions of litres of untreated sewage spew into Cook Strait, has very publicly ripped open a decades-in-the-making festering wound.
Poos in the water. You can’t really miss something like that, right?
But it’s been happening, quite regularly, for years. Just not in such an obvious way. And remember all the leaking pipes and the city’s olde wartime infrastructure? Still happening. Still there.
The plant at Moa Point is owned by the Wellington City Council, managed by Wellington Water, and since 2004 has been operated by French utility company Veolia.
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Reports dating back years have red-flagged repeated breaches, equipment failures and under-performance, while monthly reporting shows the facility has never been fully compliant for a single month since August 2023.
Wellington Water Chief Executive Pat Dougherty, who has been in the role for less than two years (he was board chair for a year prior) told RNZ in an unusually forthright interview earlier this month that he believed there had been under-investment at the plant over a long period.
He said a couple of recent incidents — including overflows in a UV‑treatment channel — may have been early signs of the problems that emerged in recent months.
Dougherty, a water engineer, was subsequently banned from speaking to media.
There are three other treatment plants in the region, also operated by Veolia; one in Karori which discharges treated wastewater into the coastal marine area of Cook Strait, near the Karori Stream mouth, and others in Porirua (where sewage travels through a series of screens, bioreactors, clarifiers and ultraviolet treatments before being discharged as liquid into Rukutane Point) and Seaview (with the open seas near Pencarrow Head being the discharge point).
They have had their own issues, including persistent odours as well as raw sewage discharges after heavy rain.
For instance in 2001 levels of animal and human faecal matter almost 10 times the acceptable limit were flushed into the South Karori stream, despite a seven-year $11 million spend on upgrading the area’s sewer network and a campaign to remove illegal connections between households and stormwater drains.
Wellington Water (formerly Capacity) was established in 2004 as a shared service council-controlled trading organisation, jointly owned by the Hutt and Wellington city councils to manage water, stormwater and wastewater services and assets. In 2013, Capacity's ownership was restructured with Hutt, Porirua, Upper Hutt and Wellington city councils all becoming equal shareholders and in 2014 they were joined by Greater Wellington Regional Council.
It has presided over a litany of failures, including sewage sludge having to be carried by trucks for months after a pipe failure, geysers erupting in city and suburban streets, and a hunt for the source of mystery faecal contamination in Taputeranga Marine Reserve in Island Bay.
Audit New Zealand reported in 2020 that in one 12-month period, there were 2096 reported overflows of wastewater across the network against a target of fewer than 100.
The inner harbour is often polluted with sewage. In late 2019 a broken sewage main on Willis St - in a Depression-era pipe - sent swimming pools' worth of dirty water into the sea, while two consecutive failures - one caused by a 'fatberg' - in 2020 saw 20,000 litres of sewage spew into the harbour.
Then in 2023 it was discovered a wastewater pipe from a building in Manners St had been discharging into the stormwater network and into the sea near the diving platform, possibly for years.
Not surprising then that the beleaguered entity has had to admit that its target of having no sewage overflows was “unachievable”.
That same year the precarious state of the region’s pipes was re-visited during the summer as a dry season, mixed with the fragile network, led to water restrictions, calls for people to take shorter showers, long queues for water tanks and a near miss with water outages.
At the time Wellington Water was crying poor, pressing for $30 billion over 30 years to fix pipes across Wairarapa, Wellington City, Porirua and Hutt Valley. Almost 240km of Wellington pipes were in very poor condition, and at the then rate of renewal, it would take Wellington City 6388 years to replace its broken pipe network.
The public, fed up with the ongoing dramas became increasingly irritated. Why was the council pouring money into “nice-to-haves” and not the basics.
Under fire from all sides the council agreed to invest $1.8bover 10 years into water upgrades, repairs and services, with then mayor Tory Whanau conceding the “record” investment meant 'passion projects' and other council initiatives would need to be delayed or cut. Those included cycleway funding being reduced by $80 million and the Golden Mile Project being re-phased.
But there was more to come. In March last year two highly critical reports revealed Wellington Water had been paying contractor Fulton Hogan three times what it should for some repair work, had a shoddy tendering process, and an incident of alleged theft amounting to tens of thousands of dollars.
A council investment for reactive maintenance (primarily for leaks) across 2025/26 is having some success, although latest data from Wellington Water shows around 1500 leaks are still being reported each month, with less than a third of them being fixed. As of December less than half of the $13.77m budget had been spent.
Not on my watch
While it’s a popular trope that decades of council neglect and under-investment in the ageing network is at the heart of the problem mayors‒from before and since Wellington Water’s creation‒are adamant that is not the case. At least, not while they were in charge.
As far back as 2001 Kerry Prendergast was being criticised for her belief that the city had to have excellent basic services to underpin anything else it wanted to do. She knew fixing the unseen stuff would cost future generations but was unrepentant about the level of debt our children and grandchildren would inherit because of that.
Spending on core infrastructure was 'an investment in the city's future', she said in 2004 as the council gave the thumbs up to borrowing $30m to improve stormwater systems, $21m on upgrading the sewerage network and $15.8m on the water network across nine years.
Asset renewals during the same period, funded by depreciation, included roading ($71.4m), sewerage ($70.9m), water ($70.8m), stormwater ($19.1m) housing ($37.5m) and footpaths ($31.7m).
For comparison $6.2m was budgeted to refurbish the Events Centre, Creative Wellington-Innovation Capital vision communication was given $11m, Wellington Convention Centre operation $34.3m and Wellington Zoo Trust $33m.
Prendergast is chair of the advisory group overseeing the creation of Wellington’s new mega-water entity Tiaki Wai.
Justin Lester, the city’s mayor from 2016 until 2019, puts the Moa Point disaster down to recent governance changes at Wellington Water, rather than any perceived (or otherwise) under-investment.
“The vast proportion of any budget in any given year was always on transport and three waters and that was sacrosanct. So what was required, certainly for water, was always given.”
The discharge of raw sewage was an 'unmitigated' and 'catastrophic' failure of both responsibility and expertise, Lester said.
“The notion [of forming Wellington Water] was to share expertise and get more efficient delivery of water services. By and large in our dealings with them and in my time as mayor they had always operated well. Up until 2019 we hadn’t had problems with water … it wasn’t a recurring issue, we weren’t experiencing problems with leaks and it wasn’t highlighted as a significant risk in any of the papers or reports we received.”
He considered a move away from its original design as a specialist engineering body along with changes to governance (with politicians appointed to oversight roles) and a high turnover of leadership as factors in its decline.
“I would say that in the last three years, communications around leaks, around investment, around the level of funds that are required, and the general performance of Wellington Water have been an unmitigated disaster.
“It’s been reputationally damaging. It’s been very confused, and for someone that was intimately involved for a number of years I just don’t understand where they’ve been coming from. For any Wellingtonian who doesn’t have the same level of background, it must be impossible to comprehend.
“It beggars belief. It was supposed to be a centre of excellence, and they failed at their job. For the entire plant to fail and they don’t know why or what’s caused it, there weren’t the appropriate checks in place and the alarm [bells] didn’t really go off, it’s a catastrophic failure.
His predecessor, Celia Wade-Brown, said her council was told, in a Long-Term Plan tabled in 2012, that the city's water infrastructure was in 'good condition' and 'overflows of untreated wastewater into the environment [were] rare'.
She pointed The Post in the direction of that plan when asked for comment on the ongoing issues, noting that it included performance measures for reducing sewage overflows and leaks.
Andy Foster, a long-term councillor and mayor from 2019 to 2022, said balancing limited budgets against the public's appetite for visible projects versus 'invisible' infrastructure was a persistent struggle for councils. Historically, there was little public pressure to fix pipes‒until they began failing visibly.
Asset management aimed to replace pipes in a timely manner. Replacing them too early was an 'inordinately expensive' waste of ratepayer money, while waiting too long led to costly failures, he said.
“I think if you stood now and said you were going to fix the pipes, of course, people would say what a great investment. But if you'd said that six years ago it would have been ‘what are you on about’ because the state of Wellington's pipes was just not an issue which was concerning the wider public.”
All shook up
Foster maintains the Kaikōura earthquake was a turning point for water infrastructure in the capital. Data showed that water use per capita was declining until 2016, when it suddenly began to trend upward, suggesting the quake triggered major leaks.
Unlike the Christchurch earthquake, where damage was immediate and obvious, the 2016 quake caused a 'drip-fed' impact in Wellington. Because the damage took years to fully manifest, hence the city did not receive the same level of immediate government disaster assistance, Foster said.
“It was really only when I became mayor and the pipes started breaking that they became the cause célèbre for infrastructure maintenance, not just in Wellington but around the country.”
While much of the debate around investment had been focused on “pipes and three waters”, there had been less concern when it came to treatment plants. As far as Moa Point was concerned Wellington Water typically received any funding it requested, Foster said.
“I don’t think it’s ever been debated. It was always how much money do you need? Are you giving us the assurance that that's keeping it at the standard that it should be? Yes. Good, done. Yeah.
“So, if they asked for ten million, they got ten million, if they asked for fifteen, they got fifteen. Obviously if they suddenly said they wanted some vast amount more then you’d certainly ask questions, but there was never any question from any politician at any stage that about the level of investment in plants.”
A report by a Mayoral taskforce into three waters during Foster’s term did highlight the state of the pipes, however.
“Although WCC has been fully depreciating its water assets for many years, and providing the funding requested, the actual level of renewals investment has consistently been significantly lower than the depreciation collected.
“Significant funding has been directed to other projects. The result is that the network is ageing and deteriorating, leading to increases in pipe breakages and increasing water loss and wastewater leakage. The scale of the financial challenge is very significant, and a reset is required.”
It has now been suggested recommendations in that report were never followed up.
Former councillor turned Green Party MP Tamatha Paul was chair of the Environment and Infrastructure committee during the time the Moa Point plant was repeatedly non-compliant and the sludge plant costs kept rising. She has been the target of recent criticism for a 2021 Long-Term Plan amendment that increased the cycleway budget while passing over an ambitious wastewater renewal option.
However minutes and reporting from the 2021 meeting confirm the cycleway amendment was made after a motion by Paul, but there is no record of the wastewater vote that day.
What was approved that day was $187.5m for a library upgrade, $147m-$208m for a Moa Point treatment plant upgrade (now the sludge plant) and $2.7 bfor pipe maintenance and upgrade.
There was concern from council staff at the time about Wellington Water’s ability to deliver the work from any extra money for water infrastructure, Paul said.
Still, politicians’ accounts of “record” funding for water services don’t wash with political commentator Bryce Edwards, who argues it is misleading to describe it that way because much of the spending went to the city’s new sludge minimisation facility.
The plant - for which ratepayers are being billed some hundreds of millions of dollars over a 33-year period ‒ is fast turning into Wellington Water’s latest albatross with estimates now putting the behind-schedule project at least $511m, millionup from $400m.
To make matters worse, an administrative error in late 2025 led to an undercharge of $3.4m, which is now being clawed back from residents in 2026 invoices.
Giving Wellington Water 'everything they asked for' was rubber-stamping, not governance, Edwards said.
“What unites all of these politicians, across the political spectrum, is a pattern that should trouble anyone who cares about democratic governance. They outsourced the management of critical assets to a council-controlled organisation that was demonstrably dysfunctional.
“They contracted a French multinational whose failures were documented for years but whose contract was deemed ‘too embedded to fail’. They accepted officer advice about funding levels without interrogating whether the organisation receiving those funds was capable of spending them effectively.
“And when the whole system produced exactly the disaster that was predictable from the documented record, many reached for the same playbook: call for an inquiry, blame the contractor, and hope the public’s attention moves on,” Edwards said.
Another victim ‒ if you can call him that ‒ of the debacle’s many tentacles is Nick Leggett, who just a day before the Government announced a Crown Review Team would conduct an independent review into the plant’s failure, resigned as Wellington Water chair.
Leggett, who is also Infrastructure NZ boss, was appointed to the utility in 2023. He said “someone had to be accountable” for the disaster and that stepping aside was necessary to underline the seriousness of the crisis and restore public trust.
Local Government Minister Simon Watts said the review team would be appointed to both Wellington City Council and to Wellington Water in a parallel process to ensure it had the necessary scope to fully investigate and report on the failure of the Moa Point Plant.
“[It] will be tasked with delivering clear, actionable recommendations which set out concrete next steps, including specific actions for Wellington City Council where necessary,” he said.
Doing water well?
From July 1 this year, new water organisation Tiaki Wai Metro Water takes ownership and operation of the Wellington region’s water infrastructure, a result of the Government’s 2024 Local Water Done Well which retained ownership and control to local councils, rather than having water assets transferred to four to 10 large regional entities as had been planned by Labour.
Tiaki Wai is limited to providing drinking water supply, wastewater and stormwater services to the Wellington metropolitan area.
It must retain ownership and control of the water services infrastructure and assets, and must comply with strict financial principles. No dividends will be paid, meaning any surplus must be reinvested.
Tiaki Wai will be chaired by Wellington-based independent director and engineer William Peet (who has had governance or leadership roles with the Department of Corrections, Ministry of Primary Industries, the Defence Force, National Ticketing System and the Ministry of Education’s Risk and Assurance Board) and board members Jon Lamonte (the former chief executive of Auckland’s Watercare), director and civil engineer Elena Trout (Waikato Waters Ltd chair)and Adrian Wimmers, a director of Crown Infrastructure Delivery (CID) which provides infrastructure delivery services to Crown agencies, nationwide.
Yet before that lot even get their feet under the table the warning lights are flashing, with the Commerce Commission announcing last week it was evaluating whether additional regulatory oversight of Tiaki Wai would help deliver better outcomes for water consumers.
“Our immediate priority is to consider whether Tiaki Wai needs stronger rules, beyond the current and planned reporting requirements, to ensure water services are well managed and provide good value for money in the long term” Commerce Commission Chair Dr John Small said.
“Given the issues we are seeing we believe it’s an opportune time to consider whether further regulation would provide better outcomes. We want to ensure Tiaki Wai addresses these challenges and consumers can see real progress.”
Insights from any investigation into the Moa Point failure are also likely to have an impact on the new unit.
For Wellington households, currently paying an average of $1711 a year for three waters – tap, waste and storm – the review undoubtedly provides some reassurance; the new structure is expected to add up to 252% to what households pay for water, currently via their rates. Exactly how much property owners will be paying for water is expected to be set out in rates notices in July.
As for answers to what went wrong, is still going wrong at Moa Point‒ three million litres of untreated, unscreened wastewater was discharged into the sea over 24 hours on Tuesday‒and why, Watts could only say the findings and recommendations needed to be timely, given July’s transference of assets to Tiaki Wai.