Ten years of boiling water in Kāeo: 'They just can't rely on the water'
Photo:
RNZ / Peter de Graaf
It has been 10 years since residents in the small Far North town of Kāeo were placed under a boil-water notice - but it is not a milestone anyone is celebrating.
Chef and cooking teacher Anna Valentine, who lives on Kāeo's main street, is among those affected.
She said she had never been able to drink from the tap, and at times she could not even use the water for laundry.
"I wasn't able to do my washing without it turning brown, basically. And every now and then it would just be super-brown, and then it would get clearer, and sometimes it would go off, and we wouldn't know, so we'd be out of water and we'd be calling up to see what happened. It's just been a roller coaster."
Valentine said the colour of the water had improved in recent years, but it was still no good for drinking.
In July 2015, Northland's Medical Officer of Health issued a boil-water notice due to levels of
E. coli
bacteria found in the water.
That notice had never been lifted.
Kāeo Water supplies just under 30 customers - a mix of homes, businesses and public facilities such as the toilets and community hall - on State Highway 10, the town's main street.
Rather than face the cost of constantly boiling water, the Valentines have rigged up a tank for catching rainwater and every day they use it to fill up bottles for drinking water.
Valentine said she had organised public meetings and lobbied the council in the past, but little had changed.
"The water needs to be drinkable out of the tap, for the kids that go to the community hall, and the people coming through town. They don't know that it's not drinkable. The businesses in town, a lot of them have installed their own rainwater tanks because they just can't rely on the water."
Kāeo chef Anna Valentine says her children have never known what it's like to drink out of a tap.
Photo:
RNZ / Peter de Graaf
Until the year 2000 Kāeo's water supply was owned by the Far North District Council.
The council sold it to Doubtless Bay Water, which quit in 2008, saying it was not economically viable.
It was then taken on by Wai Care Environmental Consultants.
Kāeo Water operator Bryce Aldridge said it was difficult keeping up with ever-changing drinking water standards, especially for a small scheme like Kāeo's.
"And the government's not assisting with the upgrading that's needed to meet those standards, because of the size of plant that we are."
Aldridge said he had never put up the price of water, and only a small minority complained about the quality.
"It's actually only one client … I have spoken to the other clients, and this is their fear [if the system is upgraded]: the water price going up, and the battle of having to put fluoride in our water, so a boil water notice actually protects us there."
The Ministry of Health has recently ordered the Far North District Council to add fluoride to its Kerikeri and Kaitāia town water supplies, but a spokesperson told RNZ the ministry did not order fluoridation of privately-owned water supplies.
Aldridge said the discolouration was caused by iron and manganese naturally present in the source water from the Waikara Stream.
Removing iron and manganese completely was difficult and required multiple treatment stages.
He said the next step for the water scheme would be to move the plant to a new location, and introduce UV treatment.
He told RNZ he had secured a new location just last week, but that had yet to be confirmed.
Kāeo's private water treatment plant, on School Gully Road, draws from the Waikara Stream.
Photo:
RNZ / Peter de Graaf
Aldridge said he welcomed media scrutiny because it had caught the attention of Taumata Arowai, the national water authority, and had bumped Kāeo's water supply up its priority list.
Taumata Arowai head of operations Steve Taylor said even a small private drinking water supply such as Kāeo's had to meet the requirements of the Water Services Act 2021 and other rules.
The authority had sent a letter outlining its expectations in March, but a meeting scheduled that month had been cancelled by the supplier.
Expectations included boil-water notice communication with consumers, and providing a confirmed, funded plan for achieving compliance with legal requirements.
Taylor said those expectations had not yet been met.
The authority had set a new date of 23 July for meeting the supplier and inspecting the plant.
Taylor said boil water notices were only meant to be a temporary solution, because over time people could forget and risked drinking contaminated water.
The authority could take action if it believed a supplier was not responding adequately to concerns about unsafe drinking water or failed persistently to comply with legal requirements.
That could include requiring the local authority, in this case the Far North District Council, to take over the supply.
All Kāeo Water's customers are based on the Far North town's main street.
Photo:
RNZ/Peter de Graaf
Te Rūnanga o Whaingaroa pou arahi, or cultural manager, Raniera Kaio said the scheme had suffered from buck-passing between the council and the operator as to who was responsible.
He believed the only way to fix it was by the council, the operator and iwi working together.
"My personal opinion, indeed my professional opinion, is that the operator lacks the resources to fix it. Lacks the resources to fix it
alone
. It has to be a collaborative solution."
Kaio said the water plant had been inundated in the 2007 floods and never fully recovered.
The boil-water notice also had a financial effect on the rūnanga, which spent $300-$400 a month on bottled water for staff and manuhiri [visitors].
He said Kāeo's water woes were emblematic of the neglect suffered by many rural, Māori-majority towns.
The effects went well beyond the cost and inconvenience of having to boil water or buy it by the bottle.
"It's about the dignity of Kāeo, the mana of Kāeo. And whānau in Kāeo have lived with daily anxiety around whether their water is safe to drink, that really affects not only your health, your hauora [wellbeing], but it sort of affects your own self-worth and your identity as being from Kāeo."
However, Kaio said he was buoyed by news that Taumata Arowai was about to meet the operator, and hopeful a solution could be found.
Meanwhile, Anna Valentine just hoped one day soon her children would be able to drink water out of the tap.
"I mean, we live in New Zealand, but it feels like we're in a bit of a third world country up here in Kāeo, having to go out every day and fill our plastic bottles from a water container that we collect off the roof. It's just crazy, actually."
Kāeo's boil-water notice is not the longest-running one in the country.
A 2024 Drinking Water Regulation Report stated 74 long-term "consumer advisories" - which include boil-water notices - were in place at the end of last year, and 20 council supplies serving a total of 7000 people had advisories in place for three or more years.
"The persistence of long-term consumer advisories represents a significant regulatory and public health challenge," the report stated.
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero
,
a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
RNZ News
2 hours ago
- RNZ News
Schools in literacy crisis, advocacy group warns
Educators say recent cohorts of teenagers entering secondary schools have had unusually numbers of students who badly need extra help with reading and writing. Photo: Unsplash/ Simeon Frank Schools have told advocacy group Lifting Literacy Aotearoa they are struggling with record numbers of students with poor literacy. They say teens are wagging classes and schools are blowing their budgets on extra lessons because they are unable to cope with tough new NCEA reading and writing tests . A snapshot of school experiences gathered by Lifting Literacy and shared with RNZ showed some students were so far behind in their learning their teachers did not know what to do with them. Lifting Literacy said the situation was a crisis and the government needed to develop a five-year plan to help schools help teens learn to read and write. Principals and teachers from 29 secondary schools responded to an informal Lifting Literacy survey. Their comments revealed the introduction of high-stakes NCEA literacy and numeracy tests called "corequisites" had coincided with the worst-prepared cohort of teenagers some schools had ever seen - thanks to Covid. "It's an enormous issue. We have an increasing number of students who are very limited in both reading and writing," wrote one respondent. "Each year students who come to us at Year 9 are showing increasingly low literacy levels and increasingly high learning needs. The impact is huge," said another. The respondents said teachers were struggling to teach classes that ranged from the barely literate to high-achievers and schools were "scrounging" for funding. "Most high school teachers do not have qualifications to address this," said one respondent. "Pressure has fallen on high schools with little or no support," said another. "We are now operating in planned deficit budgets to fund the high level of need and high stakes for students due to NCEA changes," said one principal. Several respondents said their schools bankrolled literacy catch-up classes and training from the Kahui Ako scheme that gave some teachers release time for specialist work with other teachers in their school or across groups of schools. An English teacher from a large, low-decile school who RNZ agreed not to name, said that arrangement allowed her to work with four classes of Year 9 students who could not read. She said the school would have to cover the cost itself next year because the government axed the scheme in its May Budget . Despite the relatively high numbers of struggling Year 9s, the teacher said her school's current Year 11s had entered the school with the lowest level of education of any Year 9 cohort before or since. "They're the ones that are really struggling with the corequisites because they're expected to pass but as they're failing their identity of their ability is dwindling," she said. The teacher said teaching teenagers to read was often "quite a quick fix", with most requiring only three or four "structured literacy" lessons to learn how to decode words by learning which sounds went with each letter. "Teaching kids how to read and read longer words, which seems to be the biggest problem, that's quite a quick fix," she said. "Teaching younger kids takes a longer time, teaching these older kids, even kids who really struggle and some of them who are dyslexic, once they're shown a certain way some of them are off within three or four lessons, they're gone," she said. "Some might take a lot longer, but the majority of them in high school there's nothing wrong with them other than they haven't been taught that A-U is an "or" sound or O-U-G-H can have 6-7 different sounds, or how to split up longer words," she said. She said the government could achieve great results if it funded similar programmes across the country. Another teacher who worked with others across a major city said secondary schools had been left in the lurch. She said teachers were having to figure out themselves how to help their students. "We have a cluster of people who are all working in the literacy space and we're working together and sharing our ideas and sharing with each other because we've got no support from the ministry and no guidance," she said. Janice Langford provided structured literacy training for primary schools, but recently started working with secondary teachers because of the need. She told RNZ English teachers were being asked to do the work of specialist literacy teachers and they were not trained for it. Lifting Literacy Aoteroa chair Jennie Watts said in five or 10 years, improvements the government was making in primary schools would flow through to secondary. But in the meantime, students were not getting a fair deal. "There's an urgent gap. We can't let those kids, the kids who are struggling right now and the ones who are about to hit secondary school, we can't just let them fall through the cracks. She said secondary schools needed a five-year strategy including training and funding to improve teens' literacy. It should introduce a new optional literacy subject separate to English, and remove the co-requisite numeracy and literacy requirement for NCEA. Watts said the government should also provide funding for literacy lead teachers, targeted intervention for the students who needed them, and resources aimed at teenagers. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
16 hours ago
- RNZ News
Emergency services responding to helicopter crash in Bay of Plenty
Photo: 123RF Emergency services are at the scene of a helicopter incident in Bay of Plenty. St John said it was notified of an aviation incident in Matatā at about 3.15pm Sunday. Two ambulances, two rapid response units, two helicopters and one manager attended the scene, although St John was yet to confirm the status of the patients. St John crews remain on scene, with one fire service appliance assisting. Fire and Emergency said nobody was trapped during the incident. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
a day ago
- RNZ News
More than 15k Māori and Moriori cultural heritage items may be in overseas museums and universities
By Māpuna Photo: All rights Reserved The Kaihautū of Te Papa says there could be well over 15,000 pieces of Māori and Moriori cultural heritage in overseas museums and universities. Arapata Hakiwai, who's been at Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington since it opened in 1998, told Māpuna his work with the museum began with an order from academic Sir Hirini Moko Mead. "He actually said 'Arapata you should go teaching' so I went teaching at Wellington High and he said 'you must go and work for the national museum'. It was very new to me but I found very quickly within the first year or so I was thrown well and truly into the deep end." Hakiwai said he soon realised the museum was outdated and needed to change. "Māori and Moriori ancestors, hundreds, thousands of them were taken, traded, swapped, exchanged, sold to other museums and knowing that our museum was implicitly involved in that at the highest levels." He went on to do research on the number of pieces of Māori and Moriori cultural heritage held in overseas museums and universities. "It's well over the 15, 16 thousand... and this is just a conservative figure because these figures now would be absolutely updated, there's well over 33 museums in the United States, well over 30 museums in the UK that hold Māori taonga and many of them hold large numbers. The Field Museum hold probably one of the largest, over two and a half thousand Māori taonga." The reality is a large percentage of indigenous cultural heritage is held offshore and a large percentage of that comes from an early period and that heritage should be connected back to Māori and Moriori people, Hakiwai said. "The sad reality is over 95 percent wouldn't know off that, wouldn't be aware of the extent of that or where their taonga are, or who have them." This information should be available to Māori and Moriori as matter of right not privilege, he said. Sir Hirini would often say that there are many unique taonga held overseas that we don't have equivalent to back in New Zealand, Hakiwai said. Such as Te Rā in the British Museum The Karanga Aotearoa repatriation programme began in 2003 with a sole focus on tīpuna koiwi or human remains. Hakiwai said many museums throughout the world have agreed to return the tīpuna, a huge change from when the programme started. Many museums in the international community of museums are realising the old practice of 'amassing treasures' can't continue, he said, but there are still museums who keep acquiring. The 1984 Te Māori exhibition has had a huge impact and legacy for the relationships between Māori and overseas museums, he said. "If you take Chicago at the Field Museum, the Field Museum was the last venue of Te Māori and what followed from Te Māori was the restoration of Ruatepupuke, what followed from Te Māori was you had a delegation of staff who traveled over to Tokomaru Bay to say that 'we would like to do something with respect to Ruatepupuke.'" The 19th century wharenui Ruatepupuke originally built in 1881 in Tokomaru Bay now at the Field Museum in Chicago by way of Frankfurt in Germany offers a unique example in to how museums can build partnerships with indigenous people. Maori Meeting House, Ruatepupuke II - Field Museum of Natural History Chicago Photo: Joyofmuseums Hakiwai was involved in the restoration of the wharenui in the 1990s after elders from Tokomaru visited him in Wellington. "They said 'our tīpuna whare is over there but it's unclothed, we need to re-clothe it, it's lonely, it's naked and we want to rectify that'." Initially he believed the project would culminate with the whare's repatriation, but his elders told him "Arapata kia tau te mauri, settle down." They wanted to work with the Field Museum to "reclothe" the whare tūpuna, and it remains in Chicago to this day one of the very few wharenui outside Aotearoa. Hakiwai said he believes museums can have a higher purpose in society by helping to support and uplift the foundations of culture and identity. Even if that means it is time for some of taonga within the collections of Te Papa to return home. "If that is the desire of iwi, hapū and whānau for their taonga to be returned and homed we will work with them to achieve those ends... Having taonga back in their community, in their whenua amongst their people, elevating the histories and their mana and significance surely that's something far greater than taonga sitting on a shelf," he said. It's part of reconciling what can a museum be rather than blindly following what museums are now, he said.
