Tap water Photo: RNZ / Rebekah Parsons-King
How did Wellington Water fail to fluoridate much of its water supply for months on end - and why didn't it tell anyone? The Detail takes a closer look at how it came to light and what happens next.
Another year, another Wellington Water scandal.
But the NZ Herald’s Wellington Issues correspondent Georgina Campbell says this one’s a bit different: no burst pipes here, no raw faeces running down Lambton Quay. No direct link to the chickens coming home to roost after decades of underinvestment in crucial public infrastructure.
No – this one is much more perplexing, Campbell says.
“This story is shocking. It is outrageous, it is such a scandal. I just want to make that clear, how serious this issue is.”
It’s been revealed that thousands of residents in some parts of the Wellington Region have been drinking unfluoridated water for nearly a year.
“Basically at the beginning of last week, Wellington Water issued a press release … that said for the past four years, the machines that control the dosage of fluoride into our drinking water haven’t been up to scratch.
“They’ve been ageing, and they’re a bit unreliable, and they said that how they’ve been managing that is to put a smaller dosage of fluoride through (the machines), so there’s not a risk of overdose,” Campbell says.
“But the consequence of that is there hasn’t been an effective amount of fluoride in the drinking water for four years.
“It also said fluoride had been turned off last month – about six weeks ago – at two of the plants that supply water to Porirua, Wellington and Upper Hutt.
“Later that week, Wellington Water issued another statement. It turns out that information was wrong: fluoridation at one plant had actually been turned off in May last year – 10 months ago – and at another plant in November last year.
“So residents in Wellington have been getting water that doesn’t have any fluoride in it, and they haven’t been told until now.”
Wellington Water’s board sprang into action – belatedly, in the eyes of some – launching an independent inquiry into what happened, and how.
“I guess what this independent inquiry will get to the crux of is, at what point did this issue get to in the Wellington Water hierarchy where somebody said, ‘oh no, we don’t need to take this any further?’”
Campbell says aside from the baffling bureaucratic decisions, there are very real public health implications.
According to Dental Association spokesperson Rob Beaglehole, children living in areas with fluoridated water have 40 percent less chance of having tooth decay.
And many of the areas where the water was unfluoridated have high levels of socio-economic deprivation, like Porirua.
Campbell herself reported in 2020 on a Porirua doctor who was bending the rules to get poor children with mouthfuls of rotten teeth hospital appointments.
The saga has been seized upon by politicians as an argument in favour of the government’s Three Waters reform, as Grant Robertson told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking last Friday.
Work is underway in the meantime to sort out the run-down machines the lack of fluoridation stems from.
While the costs aren’t yet known, the work is expected to take at least nine months – and in the interim, water supplies will continue to be unfluoridated.
Campbell says while this story isn’t directly related to the infrastructure issues that have plagued the capital city, it speaks to wider issues about management of one of society’s most precious resources.
“It is 2022. Residents in the capital city of New Zealand deserve to have pipes that function as they should, and do not burst randomly and discharge wastewater into the harbour. Residents deserve to have water coming out of their taps that has fluoride in it that will reduce their chances of getting tooth decay.”
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