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The Far North District Council failed a health and safety audit at its water treatment plant in Kawakawa (file photo).
Far North District Council must spend an unbudgeted $195,000 on its Kawakawa water treatment plant after a health and safety audit failure.
The plant supplies drinking water to Kawakawa and Moerewa residents.
It failed a Health and Safety at Work Act (HSWA) Hazardous Substances Regulations 2017 compliance audit in December.
The council must now spend the money on urgent plant upgrades after the fail. Almost a dozen are needed to meet requirements before a follow up HSWA compliance audit on the almost 50-year-old treatment plant.
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“Council’s obligation under the HSWA Hazardous Substances Regulations 2017 is to ensure that the Kawakawa water treatment plant is fully compliant and safe for the operators to use,” general manager of infrastructure and asset management Andy Finch said.
The Reservoir Rd facility is one of nine FNDC water treatment plants. Finch said the council’s water treatment and wastewater treatment plants needed significant HSWA compliance work.
The Kawakawa audit was part of an ongoing programme across the council’s water and wastewater plants.
“We do need to do a significant amount of work,” Finch said.
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FNDC general manager of infrastructure and asset management Andy Finch said the plant needed “significant” work to avoid being slapped with a $450,000 fine from Work Safe.
At a FNDC council meeting on Thursday, Finch got councillors’ approval for the Kawakawa plant spend.
“If approval is not provided to undertake the required identified work, then there is a risk that Work Safe will impose a fine of up to $450,000,” he said in a meeting agenda item.
Finch said the Kawakawa spend was needed to complete health and safety compliance work as a result of legislation changes.
Councillor John Vujcich sought more information on the full cost of this work across all the council’s water schemes.
Councillor Felicity Foy said the current HSWA compliance programme was positive and addressed normal maintenance work council should have been doing over the last “many years”.
She wanted a staged approach to addressing this across the council’s three waters infrastructure.
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The north of the North Island is in a prolonged drought.
Kawakawa plant test certifiers investigated what was required to make sure the entire water treatment plant complied with HSWA regulations. They also looked at what controls and documentation were available, Finch said.
“The test certifiers identified that the KWTP did not fully comply with the regulations and that additional work and new equipment was required to ensure the plant fully complied.
“As a temporary measure, the test certifiers allowed for emergency works to be put in place. This was to allow the KWTP to continue operating,” he said.
The work that had to be completed before the follow up compliance audit included chlorine management improvements – installing chlorine room ventilation openings and lining its ceiling with chlorine gas resistant and fire retardant material plus installing an auto shut-off valve in the chlorine delivery line.
A new fire-retardant wall was also required for increasing the separation distance between plant chemical storage areas. All existing PVC pipework had to be replaced with high density polyethylene. All existing electrical fittings must be upgraded.
Other work to be done included putting in a new fire door, construction of a new engineered concrete slab for a new above-ground tank.
Seismic restraints were required to be fitted to all above-ground storage tanks. Double containment was needed for new chemical storage tanks and leak monitoring devices had to be installed.
Documentation was also needed around plant processes, instrumentation and layout.
The Kawakawa water treatment plant has several individual buildings including a chemical house, filter gallery, filters, sedimentation tanks flash mixer, clear water reservoir and sludge decanting tank.
All of these, except for the decanting tank, were built in 1971.
